Subject: Format of documents for the LDP
From: wirzeniu@klaava (Lars Wirzenius)
To: "Linux-Activists" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 May 1993 09:46:55 EET DST

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.

--
[email-masked]  (finger [email-masked])
   MS-DOS, you can't live with it, you can live without it.