[plt-scheme] Re: SRFI documentation

I'm looking at html2latex at the moment.

As far as 'main medium' goes, I use two screens and still have a
printed manual open in front of me, not to mention bookshelves all
around. That said, I understand what you mean in terms of effort and
dividend.

I'll let you know if I can contrive an automated solution using the
distributed html files in /PLT/doc/srfi-std.

--hsm

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Eli Barzilay<eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> On Jun 30, Hugh Myers wrote:
>> Little point? Using SRFI-13 as an example, printed, it runs to 30
>> pages. Printed duplex, runs to 15.
>>
>> 1. you dislike trees?
>> 2. you disdain manuals (printed that is)?
>>
>> I understand that 'real' scheme programmers don't need documentation,
>> but this seems a little extreme.
>
> You forgot the "within the context of PLT" part...  In general, of the
> two documentation formats, the HTML one is important in this context
> because it is used by the help system -- so it made sense to work on
> making those index wrappers so that help works with these manuals too.
> A side benefit is that these external documents are already in HTML
> form so they're viewable alongside the rest of the plt documentation
> when used from the help system.
>
> We would probably have had to work more if, for example, the srfi
> documents were all in PDF -- then we'd need to work on converting the
> PDFs into html.  Another option is if we'd use PDFs for our help
> system, and then it would make a lot of sense to work on converting
> the srfi documents to PDF.
>
> But as things stand now, converting them is putting work into PDF
> formats that are not used in the help system and not distributed with
> the plt installers -- which is why I said that there is little point
> in doing so.  If printed papers are the main medium that you're using
> to read the manuals, then obviously it makes a lot of sense for you.
> Also, if there is some relatively painless way to convert a directory
> of random HTML (and they *are* random, since AFAICT, the pages come
> directly from srfi authors that can do whatever they) into better
> looking PDFs on Linux then we can integrate that into our nightly
> build and create PDFs for them too.  I don't know of any such tool.
>
>
>> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:24 AM, Eli Barzilay<eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
>> > On Jun 30, Hugh Myers wrote:
>> >> The process of converting from HTML to PDF is not a 'new' problem---
>> >> so yes it could magically be done.
>> >
>> > Most of the manuals are written in scribble form, which has rendering
>> > backends for latex and for html.  The srfi and r6rs documentations are
>> > used "as is" -- directly from the respective sources, and there is a
>> > thin wrapper that arranges the index.  There is little point in
>> > turning them into PDF form within the context of PLT.
>> >
>> > --
>> >          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>> >                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
>> >
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> --
>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
>