Date: Tue, 9 Nov 1999 08:07:13 -0500 From: "Gray, David W." <David_W_Gray@tvratings.com> To: "'freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG'" <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Re: Student project ideas Message-ID: <01D4D419B1A4D111A30400805FE65B13033660AE@nmrusdunsx1.nielsenmedia.com>
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Y'know, I'd like to see the output go to LaTeX. Why, you might well ask? In LaTeX, I can use a package called Vmargin to let me change the size & *shape* of a page. I like to print out pages 2up 2sided, which happens to neatly fit in the 'pc' sized binders you see all over the place. The typical way of doing this is to output postscript, and use postscript code to rotate, translate, and scale. This sucks. TeX fonts are *bitmaps* and don't scale. Also (more importantly to me), the aspect ratio (height to width) is notably different between an 8.5"x11" sheet (US letter) and the resulting 5.5"x8.5" half sheet. Also, the fonts that *do* scale (native PS), are half size, and I'm not getting any younger... I guess what I'm asking for, is whatever TeX style output format you wind up with, there be hooks in there so we can define the page appropriately. Heck, you need this already to deal with A4/US Letter differences... A doc sized for Letter doesn't look right on A4, and how many times have we had the LaserJet sitting there blinking "Feed A4"? > Date: Sun, 7 Nov 1999 20:40:57 +0000 > From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> > Subject: Re: Student project ideas > > 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 > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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