[LispM-Hackers] Explorer Documentation

[James A. Crippen]

With JWZ's (and CShapiro's) font-stripping utility I'm embarking on
the conversion of a couple of chapters of the Explorer Lisp Reference
Manual (lispref) into LaTeX for easy reading.

I've started with the idea of making books for the Lispref and IO
manuals, which are the two that I have copies of (from Steve Ford).
As I convert them I'll be putting them in e3/doc/ti-lispref and
e3/doc/ti-io.  They'll be checked into CVS along with makefiles,
etc.  The requirement for building is a fairly recent installation of
LaTeX, preferably using the teTeX distribution (others such as emTeX
and Textures should work just as well, but some packages may require
downloading from the CTAN).

I'm not making this a wholesale effort, but one that will proceed
gradually.  I can't find an easy way to write a program to
automatically convert the VISIDOC format because that format uses a
lot of in-band signalling that is hard to separate from running text.
IMHO Concordia/DocEx conversion would be a *much* easier task.

Also, I haven't worked out the format for diagrams, so I'm stripping
them out.  Perhaps later someone will look into writing a program to
convert them from their Lisp format into XFig or PostScript.

There are a lot of spurious font shifts in the VISIDOC documents which
makes automatic translation of fonts into a pain.  Thus I'm relying
more on context and comparison to get the typefaces right.

All in all the task has a high degree of manularity, but perhaps after
some experience I'll come up with some code to automate more of the
process.

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
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