Return-Path: wirzeniu From: wirzeniu@klaava (Lars Wirzenius) In-Reply-To: "Linux Activists"'s message as of May 10, 4:41 Date: Mon, 10 May 1993 09:46:55 EET DST X-Mailer: Mail User's Shell (7.1.1 5/02/90) To: "Linux-Activists" Subject: Format of documents for the LDP Status: RO X-Status: X-Mn-Key: doc One of my favorite flame wars coming up! Wonderful! I feel angry and excited already! _This_ time I'll sure burn them all so they'll think Hell is a cool place to be! On second thoughts, I think I'll mostly skip it this time. Takes too much time away from useful work. I'll just point out a few facts: 1. The LDP books are being written using LaTeX. That probably won't change. 2. Man pages and Info docs are written using the appropriate tools. That probably won't change either. 3. If you aren't satisfied with this, flaming does you no good. Try using factual arguments to convice us. We're all fairly reasonable people and will listen to facts, if presented politely. If the facts are good enough, we'll reconsider. (But they have to be very, very good facts in this case.) 4. LaTeX source is definitely not unreadable even if you don't know LaTeX. Try it sometime. Quoting from some song: ``My little baby sister could do it with ease.'' 5. Formatted versions of the docs will be provided in multiple formats, including, but not limited to, PostScript, ASCII, and Laserjet. Essentially, any format that is easy to generate from the LaTeX source will be provided. 6. Not all formats are provided yet. That's because this is still very, very unfinished stuff yet. 7. As always in Linux, if you want it done _now_, you do it. If you won't, then shut up. 8. Don't flame volunteers, it does only harm. Remember networking? (Actually, I'm prone to do it myself: that's the major reason why I stopped doing the Meta-FAQ and INFO-SHEET: they were mostly ignored.) 9. If LaTeX is too big an obstacle for you to be able to help the LDP, then tough. I don't think anyone wants to scare off anyone from the LDP, but don't expect us to go to a lot of trouble just to accomodate a couple of LaTeX-haters. Remember: you know have to install LaTeX, since the document source is almost plain text as it is. Just to be constructive, here's a few hints for reading LaTeX source: - % starts a comment that continues to the end of the line - \ starts a command word; mostly, you can ignore these - {} delimit parameters (if after a command word), and groups - [] delimit (some) parameters to command words (and those were real hard to guess). Unless someone comes up with actual facts, I'm going to ignore this discussion from now on. -- Lars.Wirzenius@helsinki.fi (finger wirzeniu@klaava.helsinki.fi) MS-DOS, you can't live with it, you can live without it. .