Subject: RE: ASCII art

From: "Yaakov Stein" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 08:30:22 +0200

The fact that file formats may become obsolete
and unreadable 20 years later is a crucially important
for IETF continuity.

I remember seeing a cartoon a few years ago
showing an email from Gates to Judge Jackson
stating that the latter's court decision was in 
an old format of Word and hence unreadable, 
and further suggesting that the Judge upgrade.

Unfortunately, I find that even ASCII files exact a price.
I find that I can usually not print an ID directly from
my browser as the lines become broken (due to the default font
being too large), and the text hard to read. 
Nor should I print directly from my word processor
as it adds a blank page between every two pages
and occasionally places the footer on a page by itself.

Sometimes I cut and paste into Word, but then the margins
come out wrong, and ASCII tables containing +-+-+-
strings become strangely augmented with unprintable characters.

So I usually end up having to cut and paste into 
a "programmer's editor", checking manually that the page breaks are OK
(usually fixing a few) and only then printing.

Admittedly this is not too time consuming, but it shows
that commercial tools are not optimized for our ASCII format,
and I wonder if I will be still be able to print at all
in a few years time.

Y(J)S

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 19:01:18 +0100

Hi Yaakov,

> and I wonder if I will be still be able to print at all

Bah.

Some problems are silly.  Not because they are not problems,
but because they are problems which cause work, bother and
inconvenience out of proportion to the first impression of
the problem, when it shouldn't be that hard to fix.

I know Geoff Huston some years ago started providing PDF 
conversions of RFCs, presumably for similar reasons to the one
you describe above.  I hadn't realised that conversions of IDs
were unavailable, since I usually handle printing through a2ps
myself.

Anyway, I've added text-to-pdf conversion for all RFCs and IDs
under the URL http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/, so you can get pdf-
conversions of our various documents.  Examples:

  http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/rfc2549.pdf
  http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/draft-ietf-mobike-protocol-06.txt
  http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/std1.pdf
  http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/fyi36.pdf
  http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/bcp100.pdf

This uses basically the same conversion procedure which Geoff
came up with, although I've added a few tweaks to handle IDs
which lack embedded form-feeds, to place the text more centered
on the page, and to do on-demand conversion.

I'll be gradually adding links to pdf versions of drafts and
RFCs to the WG and Agenda pages at tools.ietf.org.

Comments welcome.

	Henrik