Subject: Re: Source Format of RFCs

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 1998 09:37:09 -0800

At 01:00 AM 12/1/98 -0800, Bruce Balden wrote:
>De facto, all of the lengthier documents, if not the shorter ones as well, 
>are prepared by their authors orginally in some richer format

I'm not sure you can say that. I can tell you outright that MIBs are
generally done using nroff, because the accepted boilerplate is an nroff
source. Ditto PPP documents. The longest RFCs that come to mind - 1122,
1123, and 1812, were all done in nroff. I'll agree that a lot of documents
are written as ASCII text in some editor capable of other-than-ASCII, but
I'm not sure I'll buy off on "they all are"

>MS Word is a good format because it is searchable, but IETF would need a 
>guarantee from Microsoft never to require a licensing fee for the Word 
>viewing program. It should also be noted that the Word viewing program is 
>available for Solaris and perhaps other UNIX-like OS's.

It would also need a full Word implementation that ran on Solaris and BSD
Unix, as the RFC Editor would otherwise not be equipped to create the
documents. Not everyone creates their documents on PCs.

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From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 1998 15:26:54 -0600

A fork: is there an nroff that runs on Windows?  I could use one, I
don't have a spare partition for Unix.

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From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 1998 15:26:54 -0600