Re: [jazzplusplus-devel] SF.net SVN: jazzplusplus: [595] trunk/jazz/src/HelpFiles/jazz.tex

[D.B. M. <db...@ho...>]

Greetings,

Note: this has been quietly BCC'd to Pete's verizon account 'cos 
I believe he's missing mail, thank you not verizon....


> Subject: SF.net SVN: jazzplusplus: [595] trunk/jazz/src/HelpFiles/jazz.tex
> Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:01:59 -0700
> 
> Revision: 595
>           http://jazzplusplus.svn.sourceforge.net/jazzplusplus/?rev=595&view=rev
> Author:   pstieber
> Date:     2008-06-11 08:01:58 -0700 (Wed, 11 Jun 2008)
> 
> Log Message:
> -----------
> 1. Made Donald B. Moore the primary author.
> 2. Changed the date from May to June.
> 
> Modified Paths:
> --------------
>     trunk/jazz/src/HelpFiles/jazz.tex

Well, I'm sure I'm chuffed by this recognition, however I'm not sure
whether I've yet done enough to deserve such accolade - thanks Pete,
I'll attempt to live up to the honor!

Firstly here, I readily admit my knowledge of tex/latex is infantile - I've
never actually worked with the suite at all, however I do understand it's
purpose in life. Ergo, the jazz.tex file itself forms my own learning curve
and personal mountain to climb -- like any studious fellow, as I stumble
across things I do not know, I do the RTFM thang. That said, the more
of this I do the more I come away scratching my head a bit -- not about
what I'm reading, but more regarding jazz.tex itself.

I think mainly here what I'm after is a bit of guidance regarding how to
treat jazz.tex -- this is like saying "I can swim, but I'm in the middle of this
big pool of water...a couple of pointers on how to get to land would be nice"
I should quickly explain what I'm doing here...

If for no other reason than it being immediately easy to meld tex2rtf into
the fold, I use 'Kile' to edit the jazz.tex file. The 'quickbuild' function I've
configured to use tex2rtf with the same invocation that Makefile defines,
This seems to work just fine for html generation, however I noticed last
night PDF generation was broken -- this will be my fault. 

That in itself doesn't bother me right now -- my thinking here is that 
provided the html manual generation always works, it self supports the
website content as well as jazz++ documentation overall...ie; everyone
has a web-browser. Somewhere during my climb up the mountain side,
I'll go "doh!" as it occurs to me how to fix PDF generation again...I'll get
there, I like a challenge...

Now...one thing that troubles me, is the way the above  tex/latex  app  
'Kile', or 'TexMaker', and one or two other such editors, howl about tex
syntax or formatting issues within jazz.tex itself -- again, some of this 
may well be my fault again, however I noticed the same complaints are
generated by older versions (all I tried,  including those I'd never touched)
and that led me to the Dr. Spock raised single eyebrow expression...

When you mention the issue with /U UL and such with tex2rtf, am I right
in concluding that a lot of error issues I am seeing are so related to
'deprecated' style usage? For example...what I'm finding is \urlref 
or such is now \url (if I'm right?) and for whatever reason the editor was
auto-suggesting me to use \underline{ } ...which of course tex2rtf gets wrong,
so instead of getting this , you get

this

instead. So I've removed those tics for now so the html still looks sane.
Knowing very little, I don't want to fall into the trap of reading the latest
and greatest tex/latex documentation, when I need to restrict the format
of the jazz.tex file to the 'older' feature set supported by tex2rtf. Perhaps
if tex2rtf did become it's own separate project one day, these sorts of 
issues would be top-of-the-list of things todo.....however, if I need keep
jazz.tex correct to an older guideline, it'd be handy to know exactly where
that line is. 
 
Regards,

Donald B

PS: My son rather suddenly (although not altogether unexpectedly) moved
out of home yesterday, venturing out on his current life ambitions of getting
some 'real world experience' as it were, away from the regiment of academic
study. For myself, this is a moment long visualized that one can never really
prepare themselves for, and unlike most folks this is a juncture in life I reach
alone, without the wife/mother/partner being any part of the current picture.

The actual experience has turned out to leave me feeling somewhat dazed 
and confused,  although he did say in parting that I was welcome to use 
his winXP box while he was gone.
 
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