[9581] in Athena Bugs
Re: rt 7.4G: help
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Chris Craig)
Thu Jul 9 15:16:12 1992
To: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
From: Chris Craig <craig@ics.com>
Cc: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 09 Jul 92 13:41:04 -0400.
Date: Thu, 09 Jul 92 15:07:11 -0400
>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.
I understand. My bug report would be that I don't think it does a good
enough job. I understand that you are not going make any attempt to fix it.
Fair enough, as long as (c) keeps happening.
>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.
Well, if I were writing something whose final form is intended to be
exclusively paper, I'd use LaTeX too (sorry Bill). But this document has
many final forms, all equally important, I believe. I'm glad to hear that
documentation realizes that conversion to plain text is important.
>
>Maybe the release engineering people are the ones who should be
>encouraged not to use LaTeX in the future :-).
Indeed. My apologies for unfairly criticizing the doc staff.
Chris
