Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 20:40:57 +0000 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: Ben Cohen <bjc23@hermes.cam.ac.uk> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Student project ideas Message-ID: <19991107204057.A89993@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.SOL.4.10a.9911071750570.20334-100000@orange.csi.cam.ac.uk>; from Ben Cohen on Sun, Nov 07, 1999 at 05:51:11PM %2B0000 References: <Pine.SOL.4.10a.9911071750570.20334-100000@orange.csi.cam.ac.uk>
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On Sun, Nov 07, 1999 at 05:51:11PM +0000, Ben Cohen wrote:
> I'm a student doing Computer Science at Cambridge University. This year I
> have to do a project (to take about 8 months), and I wondered if you can
> suggest anything.
Absolutely.
> (I'd probably find writing tools for X, networking, TeX/LaTeX and system
> admin stuff interesting, although not all ideas will be suitable for this
> project. If someone suggests something that I find interesting, I might
> do it sometime anyway, even if it isn't suitable;)
The Documentation Project could use your help with TeX.
Specifically, we have an application, called Jade, that we use to convert
the FreeBSD documentation from it's source format, to TeX format, which we
then process through TeX to produce PS and PDF versions of the FAQ, the
Handbook, and so on.
The problem is that Jade doesn't write raw TeX. Instead, it assumes that
the TeX installation includes a macro package that provides a specific
set of macro calls. The .tex file produced from Jade contains copious
calls to these macros.
At the moment, we have a macro package called JadeTeX that (partially)
implements these calls. You can find it in the ports tree, as
print/jadetex. However, the current maintainer (Sebastien Rahtz) is
moving on to other things, and won't be maintaining it.
The JadeTeX macros need a new maintainer. This might include scrapping
them and starting again, or it might consist of updating the existing code
to cope with its various shortcomings. If you're interested, I can also
point you at a mailing list full of people who have ideas for things that
JadeTeX should provide that it currently doesn't support.
N
--
If you want to imagine the future, imagine a tennis show stamping
on a penguin's face forever.
--- with apologies to George Orwell
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