MathPack - Best way to Package & Document?

Pascal Bourguignon pjb at imaginet.fr
Mon Jul 23 18:09:09 UTC 2001


> From: "Jarvis, Robert P. (Contingent)" <Jarvisb at timken.com>
> Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 13:20:44 -0400
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Phil Weichert [mailto:weichert at hal-pc.org]
> > Sent: Monday, July 23, 2001 12:07 PM
> > To: Squeak Dev
> > Subject: MathPack - Best way to Package & Document?
> >
> > <snip!>
> > What is a good method of handling the documenation?  Word 2000?
> 
> As far as the docs go, MS-Word would be a pretty poor choice IMHO as it's
> limited to the Windows platform only.  Postscript would be a nice choice for
> display-only stuff, with PDF and perhaps RTF being alternatives.  Flat text
> is also an option - it's not pretty, but it *is* portable!
> 
> Bob Jarvis
> Compuware @ Timken

And think  about the portability in time  too, not only on  a range of
computers at a given date.

We still  can read  ASCII documents such  as rfc0001.txt dated  back 7
April 1969, and I'm said that  on some unices, we still can read ASCII
based document such as man page dating back from 1968, and we can read
these documents  on the whole  range of today computers  and hopefully
for the unforseeable future.

Now, tell  me please, can you  read documents written  with MS-Word in
1986? Five  years ago? Of  last year? For  sure, I can't  read MS-Word
document written today with MS-Word  *2001* on my StarOffice which can
read only MS-Word *2000* documents.

If  you're  really  serrious  about  your  documents,  write  them  in
SGML. This is an ASCII based  standard for which we have tools to read
them on every  computer present and future (HTML  is an application of
SGML).


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