[GRLUG] RFCs, LaTeX and metadata.

[Michael Mol]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 10:13 AM, John-Thomas Richards
<jtr at jrichards.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 09:30:35AM -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
>> If you check out http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfcxx00.html , you can get
>> a listing of all current, non-obsoleted RFCs.
>>
>> I'd like to get all of these into a single, well-organized ePub, so I
>> can throw it on the Nook and read them in a reflowable format. I
>> *think* LaTeX is probably the best starting place. However, I (a)
>> don't know LaTeX well at all, and (b), I'd like to work on it with
>> people who know it well enough to help me avoid making stupid
>> mistakes.
>>
>> (Little is more annoying than spending a weeks' worth of free time on
>> something, only to be told at the end, "why didn't you do it this
>> way?" ... Actually, that's how my last vacation was spent.)
>>
>> The source documents are all preformatted plaintext. To my knowledge,
>> that's generally their original format, as well. Conversion to a
>> reflowable format will require a lot of manual work.
>
> I know a little bit of LaTeX.  What is a "reflowable format"?
> Adjustable width?  (Why, on a Nook?)

Big advantage to a reflowable format is that I can show it on the
nook, show it on my computer, use it in my browser, etc, as I'm
chugging along through.I was able to get through my O'Reilly epubs
within a couple weeks, that way.

>
> If the documents are in plaintext you may want to check out pandoc.
>
> http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
>
> In the examples it shows a README file converted to .epub.  The example
> for .epub is impressive.

I'll have to check it out. Currently installing calibre again, to see
if it can handle epub better than it was able to handle other formats.

-- 
:wq

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