[LMH]Outstanding work on SSDN2

[John Morrison]

Hi;

On Friday 26 April 2002 05:17 am, James A. Crippen wrote:
> John Morrison <jm@mak.com> writes:
> > For what it's worth, I am frankly a little stunned at how great a job
> > you guys have done on OCRing, typing, editing, formatting, etc. SSDN2.
> > This is such a dramatic improvement over the original page scans.  So
> > far, I am finding it to be incredibly useful.  Wow.
>
> It'll only get better.  I'm looking at in the future going over the
> thing with hyperref to add hyperlinks that can exist in both DVI and
> PDF versions.

(He asked, most definitely pushing his luck...) Now that you guys have
got this down to a science, does this mean I should finally scan in my
LISP CHINE NUAL for similar treatment?  I promised Francois Rideau at
tunes.org that I would someday do this, but it has never risen to the
front of my 9-PalmPilot-page "todo" list.

> At some point I'd like to get LaTeX->HTML and LaTeX->text conversion
> working as well.  The former so it can be put on the web page, the
> latter for grepping, text terminal viewing, etc.
>
> On other documentation fronts, I'd like to see some literate
> programming be put into the current sources, so that documentation can
> be automatically snarfed from them to generate details that are

Some of the folk at work swear by Doxygen (sp?).  Unfortunately, I
have never played with is.  Let me know what to do.

> otherwise lost in the sea of semicolons.  This would be particularly
> nice when reviewing code, as one could just print out the pretty
> TeXified version and sit at the coffee shop with it, the SSDN2, and a
> hot cup of coffee.  And it'd be useful for newbies, as they could
> actually have some explanation of what they are looking at.
>
> Programming is an art.  Computing may be a science, but programming is
> an art.  And artists should have beautiful things.  Ergo, source code
> should be beautiful.  And readable too, despite what C and Perl people

Mine is kind of, er, Picasso-esque.  Not in the "Wow that's beautiful"
sense, but in the "WTF? Both eyes are on the same side of the face!" 
sense.  On the other hand, maybe my code is more Chiaroscuro -- half
completely hidden in darkness.  Oh, well -- my lack of a Classical
Education is showing.

-jm

-- 
==== John Morrison
==== MAK Technologies Inc.
==== 185 Alewife Brook Parkway, Cambridge, MA 02138
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