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Re: Internet Draft Guidelines Require Precise Formatting?

2003-04-21 17:40:19
--On Monday, 21 April, 2003 18:44 -0400 Joe Abley <jabley(_at_)isc(_dot_)org> wrote:

On Monday, Apr 21, 2003, at 18:41 Canada/Eastern, Paul Hoffman
/ IMC wrote:

At 6:15 PM -0400 4/21/03, Joe Abley wrote:
Do people really mark up internet drafts by hand instead of
using  tools like nroff or Dr Rose's rfc2629 tools?

You forgot the third choice: no markup. Just use a text
editor that  can create paragraphs easily. There are many on
most platforms.

Actually I didn't forget the third choice; I just should have
said "generate" instead of "mark up".

So, if you generate I-Ds by hand, why do you do that? Surely
it's more hassle than just formatting paragraphs (section
numbers, cross-references, tables of contents, pagination,
etc).

Actually, no, it is not more hassle. I've been using straight emacs and its clones as my main I-D production/generation tool for years. Paragraphs are easy, pasting in boilerplate is easy, indention is easy, keeping track of section numbers and references is a major (but necessary) annoyance, but pagination (and per-page headers and footers are a significant annoyance that involve little payoff. And there are huge advantages to editing on exactly the document form the WG is looking at, rather than having to transpose comments into some other formatting setup that then generates the I-D format.

I've also tried using the MS Word tools with complex documents where I wanted to do extensive change-tracking and annotation. MS Word (especially Word XP) is very good at that, but getting heavily-annotated, cross-referenced, and precisely formatted documents from Word format into RFC (or I-D) format using RFC 3285 and its template setups is, well, a learning experience... and not one that I can recommend to others.

      john