[GRLUG] RFCs, LaTeX and metadata.

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 10:18:15AM -0400, Michael Mol wrote:
> 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.

Ah.  That makes sense.  LaTeX wouldn't have a problem churning through
the preformatted text
since
it
doesn't recognize
line
breaks
the way other programs do.  For example, if this were a LaTeX document
this would be one paragraph with properly formatted margins (determined,
of course, by LaTeX).

[snip]
-- 
john-thomas
------
Brain: an apparatus with which we think we think.
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) [The Devil's Dictionary]

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