POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.unofficial.patches : format for documentation : Re: format for documentation Server Time
2 Sep 2024 20:20:02 EDT (-0400)
  Re: format for documentation  
From: Ralf Muschall
Date: 25 Jan 2000 20:22:54
Message: <388E4B7E.2DAE21BC@t-online.de>
Nathan Kopp schrieb:

> I guess I worded that poorly.  I was hoping for answers like:
>   "I use unix, and I'd like _____."
> or
>   "I use Windows, and I'd like ______."

I use Unix, and almost everything there can be converted into
almost erverything else (if it is standard compliant and does
not involve the violation of the second law of thermodynamics,
as e.g. back from PS to HTML).

Since it seems that you write (or even already wrote part of)
the manual in Word, the situation is nontrivial: Everything
that Word creates is either proprietary (.doc, .hlp with
additional tools) or noncompliant (broken .ps, broken .html).

Something like SGML or XML might be optimal for the world,
since people who have tools can convert it into everything else
(AFAIK including .rtf, opening the way into the evil empire)
and put on their FTP servers.

OTOH, forcing you to use SGML would cost your time, thus
depriving us all of more cool patches to POV.

A compromise would be to use what you are familiar with,
and publish it as RTF (for those who want to manipulate
it) and HTML for online reading. People who want to print
it can use the export function of the browser (or you just
publish a copy in .ps as well).

Btw., the .ps from MS stuff can be made compliant using

      gs -sDEVICE=pswrite -other_options ...

(but this fixes the resolution and increases the filesize, and
seems to impair quality).

If you can publish only one version, HTML might be optimal
(it can be converted to .ps using browsers and printed,
if necessary).

Ralf


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