Date: Thu, 17 Oct 1996 18:53:23 -0400 From: Joel Ray Holveck <joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: bogusz@lib.amu.edu.pl Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: A PostScript editor Message-ID: <199610172253.SAA14398@hill.gnu.ai.mit.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.91.961016203244.30723A-100000@lib.amu.edu.pl> (message from Bogusz Jelinski on Wed, 16 Oct 1996 20:58:35 %2B0100 (MET))
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I'd like to write a manual for my software and because it should contain charts, schemas and so on it cannot be an ascii file. Would anyone suggest any up-to-date file format : PostScript, MS Word (forgive my mentioning it), HTML, Acrobat, dvi. I personally recommend LaTeX (or, for the Real Tech Writers, TeX... and you can use TECO to edit it. :-) ) LaTeX produces excellent output, partially because it's a typesetter, not a WYSIWYG editor. That is to say, you can use emacs, pico, teco, vi, Windows notepad, or whatever you want to type in a file that says what your document is supposed to contain, then run LaTeX over it. LaTeX then produces a DVI file, which can be run through dvi2ps to produce your PostScript output. It produces better output than MS Word or other popular word processors because it can work on the overall pages as a whole, and take its time making decisions. If putting a line break here makes an orphan line down there, then that can be handled. Word processors have to make these decisions real-time, so they don't have the liberty of making as many calculations and decisions. Many of the foo.ps files you see out there were generated using TeX or LaTeX. HTML really isn't suitable for making printed documentation. It is designed for content over presentation because the same HTML document must be readable on everything from ASCII terminals to high-resolution workstations. In producing a manual, you don't need to worry about this, so something with more presentation controil is advisable. The GNU project uses TeXinfo for their documentation. It is designed to be easily converted to TeX or info (a special hypertext format used by emacs). Later on, TeXinfo to HTML converters were designed. However, if the printed page is your concern, I find TeX or LaTeX to be more well-rounded. I haven't dealt with Adobe Acrobat, but I would tend to steer you toward LaTeX instead. It is free software, and because of that it has extentions for every conceivable purpose. As I prefer PostScript I am looking for a PS-editor - it should generate .ps files. Is there such a tool (not necessarily a free of charge one)? There must be - there are so many docs.ps in the ftp-archives. You can actually use any text editor to generate .ps files, but I don't recommend it. Most .ps files are generated by TeX or other tools. Cheers, Joel
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