Re: ASCII back end

[Aaron Roydhouse]

==> "Jeff" == Jeff Kingston writes:

Jeff> Well, in view of all the interest, looks like an ASCII back end
Jeff> has to go on my list of things to do.  I don't think it's
Jeff> feasible though to have the ASCII version having the same page
Jeff> breaks as the PostScript version, especially if @Bullet becomes
Jeff> <bl> and so on.  Actually making sure that @Bullet comes out as
Jeff> <bl> is quite easy, it just means changing the definition of
Jeff> @Bullet in DocumentLayout, which package would clearly need to
Jeff> be duplicated anyway.

If there was an ascii output option, I'd be using it for online use
and it would be inherently inferior since it would lack diagrams. I
wouldn't care about having any page breaks at all. The output wouldn't
be much different from a stripped source file except that macro
abbreviations, references, and bib references would be done. Bullets
and the like would be something sensible, like "-", "=", "=", or
"o". Overall the idea is for a human readable copy of the _text_.

If there were a formatted ascii output option, then I'd think a
sensible idea would to produce text based on SGML. Such output could
then be processed by the existing and developing SGML to ascii, rtf,
postscript, HTML, converters available. The SGML to HTML conversion
path would allow lout documents to provided on World Wide Web for
viewing by such as NCSA Mosaic and the Mac and PC versions just
released. Let me be whimsical a moment and point out that references
could automatically be links to appropriate parts of the document and
bib entries links to online versions of the documents elsewhere in WWW.

Can I have that by Tuesday Jeff? :-)

Aaron.