Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 14:22:59 +0100 From: Udo Erdelhoff <ue@nathan.ruhr.de> To: doc@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: RFC: dynamically generated MASTERDOC? Message-ID: <20020313142259.M23882@nathan.ruhr.de> In-Reply-To: <20020313145055.B1288@straylight.oblivion.bg> References: <20020313145055.B1288@straylight.oblivion.bg>
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Hi, On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 02:50:55PM +0200, Peter Pentchev wrote: [solve problems with 'special' national chars by converting them on the fly during the doc build] I do not like the idea at all, even though I could profit from it for the DE versions (we have our own set of special characters). The basic problem is simple: What happens if somebody without support for your special charset needs to access the document? Chances are that your average $EDITOR will throw a fit because of all those strange characters and that you will be unable to work on the file. And if you must fix the file because it breaks the doc builed, you are up the proverbial stream. > The truth is, I only tested this with an article build. I have no idea > whether it will work with a book. Still, I would like to gather some > opinions on whether people like this change or there is a far better > and faster way of dealing with "strange" characters in .sgml sources. We have similar problems with the German version and there is a better solution. You can either a) reprogramm your editor to insert the correct SGML entity when you hit the key(s) that would generate your special character b) attach conversion scripts to the load/save process that do the on-fly-conversion for you. The file you edit seems to contain the special characters but the real files on disks contain the SGML entities. Check the examples directory for the scripts. They are intended for vim and work reasonably well. Personally, I prefer option a) because it also ensures that the line length will be reasonable even if people do not use the on-the-fly conversion scripts. /s/Udo PS: Having to enter the SGML stuff by hand is not that bad - I just translated the complete Release Notes with an english keyboard and had to type all those ä by hand. You get used to it ;-) -- I have learned over the years, that if it is the truth you seek, then honesty on your own part, is the best policy. That and torture. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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