Hi Yaakov, on 2005-11-23 07:30 Yaakov Stein said the following: > 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. 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 _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf