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From: Jari Aalto <jaalto@tre.tele.nokia.fi>
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Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 05:48:17 -0500
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To: cognot@ensg.u-nancy.fr
CC: mrb@Eng.Sun.COM, xemacs-beta@xemacs.org, tm-en@chamonix.jaist.ac.jp
Subject: Re3: Building gnus-art-mime.elc
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|Thu 28.11.96, Richard Cognot <cognot@ensg.u-nancy.fr>
|
| >>>>> "Jari" == Jari Aalto <jaalto@tre.tele.nokia.fi> writes:
|
|     Jari> just a quick note to this SGML subject: I think people
|     Jari> should no more write any textinfo of TeX or LateX files,
|     Jari> whatever, because they are not portable. We don't have Tex
|     Jari> or dvi here and I have no way of printing the emacs docs
|     Jari> currently.  (if the docs were in html, I could do .ps with
|     Jari> my netbrowser!)
|
| Please no!
|
| TeX/LaTeX/texinfo are the most portable thing I know of. Personnally I
| really don't care for SGML or the likes, but there are good translators
| available to convert texi files to HTML already.
|
| Also, installing a complete TeX system is trivial if you use the teTeX
| distribution.


Sorry, that didn't express myself more clearly. My main point is that
No-one should not seriously consider writing any documentation in other
format than SGML, especially when its question about great product
like emacs.

What I meant was that:

    Once the authors write it in SGML, and provide the SGML (even
    from ftp somewhere, not needed to include with Emacs distribution)
    they can run the SGML text through filters that do convert the
    text into any format.

    In this case the emacs distribution still could have .texi or
    .tex files. I wan't going to suggest that the doc format that
    is distributed would have been changed.

I don't want to install TeX or the kind, because they're old and not
usefull if we talk about portability. The SGML is future, although
very new currently.

If I would use TeX, it means that I have to learn it, or learn texinfo
or learn Latex or... that is not needed if I only learn SGML and DTD,
I don't have to learn anything else, I just the existing filters to
prduce .texi or .html or RTF or .ps or....

So, if someone is serious in distributing documentation, the
SGML is the right road, any other road is a small and bumby and not
portable, when we head to the future.

The SGML is becomming an enterprise/company standard
in documentation and the Emacs should also keep
in the nerve of the time.

...sure, we can all sit back and stick to the old way, but
I wanted to bring to your attention that SGML provides more
than any other old system.

/jari

