[9580] in Athena Bugs
rt 7.4G: help
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Thu Jul 9 13:41:26 1992
Date: Thu, 9 Jul 92 13:41:04 -0400
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: craig@ics.com
Cc: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: [9579]
From: Chris Craig <craig@ics.com>
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 92 13:23:31 -0400
Sender: craig@ics.com
>The document was written in LaTeX, which is unfortunately very
>difficult to convert to plain text. What you see when you read it on
>a non-X terminal is the output of dvi2tty, which is admittedly not all
>that great, but which can't be much improved upon. I will forward
>your report to the documentation group, but I don't think they're
>going to be able to do much about it.
In that case, the bug should be for dvi2tty. I now understand why the lines
are greater than 80 characters, but the extra formatting stuff? (That's why
I initially thought it was an nroff-type thing)
Read what I said again. LaTeX output (a DVI file) is "very difficult
to convert to plain text." Dvi2tty does the best it can. It isn't
likely that we will put effort into improving it significantly, since
(a) it's not possible to improve it all *that* much, (b) we didn't
write it and therefore there is no one here familiar with the code,
and (c) the doc group has been trying to write more of their documents
in Ez and/or other formats that can be converted to ASCII more
readily.
LaTeX is a fine and wonderful system, but there are still people trying to
read things in a terminal window :-)
The documentation group knows its business, Chris. I don't know why
the system release notes were written in LaTeX, since the doc group
has been encouraging the use of Ez. It is true that they were written
by release engineering and not by people in documentation, which
perhaps is explanation enough.
Maybe the release engineering people are the ones who should be
encouraged not to use LaTeX in the future :-).
Jonathan Kamens
IS/Athena Quality Assurance
