On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 1:38 PM, Michael Richardson <mcr@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > having things in PDF to start with seems like a good baby step. > Yes, starting with just a "baby step" seems like the best way to tackle this problem. A simple rule could be: "At least one of the provided formats should be PDF. Extra Credit if your document conforms to PDF/A." On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 1:18 PM, Henning Schulzrinne <hgs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > [... PDF conversion tools are immature...] > > Thus, requiring authors to upload "random" PDF isn't unreasonable, in my view, but requiring PDF/A or doing server-side PDF conversion raises the bar significantly, for all parties in the process. > Thank you for the notes on PDF conversion. As nice as an automated tool would be, the overhead in creating and maintaining such a tool sounds challenging. Add to that the variances between the output of different programs and shortcomings of the PDF conversion libraries, and it sounds like a huge bit of work. For now, I agree that the best possible method of creating the PDFs would be to ask the authors to create them. On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 12:52 PM, David Morris <dwm@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > ....If you have a solution that actually > works for everyone without adding much to their time burden, test it, > demonstrate it with your own materials, etc. > I'm not sure what kind of information is available online comparing the various tools and methods of creating PDFs from various source file formats, however if such a resource doesn't exist, I'd be happy to help work on documentation for a "Best Practices" manual. Hopefully some very simple and clear documentation would reduce the burden of PDF conversion to a minimum. On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Nick Hilliard <nick@xxxxxxx> wrote: > perhaps have a data tracker tool which insists on pdf, but also welcomes > other original formats (e.g. .ppt / .pptx / .key / .tex / etc). Similar to > the I-D upload tool which insists on .txt but welcomes xml / etc. > This sounds like a great idea. The simplest version of the upload tool could just check file extensions and make sure that one of the uploaded files is named "*.pdf". Sure -- someone could intentionally upload an incorrect or out-of-date exported PDF, but I think that most people are mature enough to work under the honor system. Just having a little hurdle in there will be enough to remind the absent-minded to upload the PDF version alongside their primary source file. I'm not really sure who is in charge of developing and deploying tools for the IETF. Is there someone serving in a technical support role who would be interested in brainstorming or chatting about mocking-up a tool? -- Robinson _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf