philipp@LARRY.MCRCIM.MCGILL.EDU (Philip A. Prindeville) (07/08/88)
The trick is getting whoever has the machine-readable source for the text to create straight ASCII for public consumption (and of course the diagrams and such disappear). (I will no doubt get flamed, but...) There are obvious undeniable advantages to providing the RFCs, IDEAs, etc in ASCII line-printer-ready format. Yet there is also the need to express things that can't be described adequately or as concisely using just text. I think it is time that we move towards using a page description language for giving tables, state diagrams, etc. -Philip PS: Can anyone think of a language? :-)
stjohns@BEAST.DDN.MIL (Mike St. Johns) (07/08/88)
The Internet Engineering Task Force IDEA Series has adopted Postscript as the page description language of choice. While a submitter *must* provide a straight ASCII document, he *may* also provide a postscript version with it. Mike
nittmann@rusvx1.rus.uni-stuttgart.dbp.de ("Michael F.H. Nittmann ") (07/09/88)
"languages" to distribute documents in standardized form and to do
joint editing:
SGML/ISO8879, CGM/ISO8632, ISO8613 part 7, ccitt T.147 are good for
joint editing(standardized graphic markup language), comp.graph.meta files...
since there will be an iso transition (sic) these distributions could
be already in some iso standardized form. AND: this would be a step to a
real distributed document archiving, editing and distribution facility
(perhaps somebody might look at a project called DAPHNE in germany?).
And tex is even running on ataris, ibm compatibles, amigas, so even the
lowest end equipped people could participate (tex and a 9 needle printer!).
michael