Andrew Sullivan wrote:
What I find strange about this, though, is the reluctance to adopt
PDF. It's a well-known open standard. There are plenty of free
software interpreters and writers around, and Ghostscript passed the
threshold for good output 2 or 3 versions ago. I understand the
difficulty of machine parsing, but wouldn't an XML format with human
oriented output in PDF be nice? (I suppose I'm asking whether
there's some historical flamewar over this that I managed never to
look at, in which case I'll just keep my mouth shut.)
There is. Lets not reopen the format flame war. However,
just for the record we DO have .pdf as a format that you
can submit Internet Drafts and as something that you
also get from the RFC Editor. It is required that a text
format be also provided, which I think is natural and
useful. Some of the PDF documents that people have
used have contained illustrations such as state machines.
See for instance this RFC
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc4137.pdf
and for some tool support take a look at
http://www.arkko.com/tools/xml2pdfrfc.html
Of course, even if that was solved, the features of Word that other
like are not really available in most of the XML tools, AFAIK.
I kind of like the rfcdiff feature in text format more
than the word features.
--Jari
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