From tpearse@boi.hp.com Tue Oct 15 15:49:56 1996 Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 15:29:52 -0600 From: Troy PearseTo: suthe922@cs.uidaho.edu Cc: oman@gold.cs.uidaho.edu, tpearse@hpdmd48.boi.hp.com Subject: Doc Format Dear Noah, You put me in an awkard situation with your documentation format. I understand the limitations of UNIX editors available. However, maintainable documentation is a deliverable of your project, and I will not accept LaTeX because I do not want to maintain a LaTeX document. HTML is an minimum acceptable alternative as I have access to an HTML document editor, but I am not thrilled with having to maintain HTML either, as many of the document management features I use are not avalable. Please make sure to provide ample on-line man pages, using the standard UNIX man-page format. Troy Pearse Hewlett-Packard > Mr. Pearse, > > One more issue we need to discuss is the documentation format you need > for this project. We did not discuss this with you at our first > meeting, and Dr. Oman has informed us that you will need a modifiable > set of documents at the end of the semester. > > He also believes that you do not want the documentation in LaTeX format, > which we have been using for all of our documentation. We chose LaTeX > because it creates a very professional document without a lot of work. > Also, it is the best option at present for doing work on unix machines, > since there are no "word processors" easily available. > > If LaTeX is not acceptable for you, we see one possible alternative of > producing the documentation in HTML format. We have experimented with > latex2html, a program available freely on the Internet. This program > does an excellent job of converting LaTeX files into multiple-page HTML > files and includes any graphics inline. > > We think this is a very good option for the documentation since we > understand that using HTML for documentation is common at Hewlett > Packard. > > At this point, we feel that totally recreating our documents in a > different format (i.e. MS Word), would be a very large project and > would not be a prudent use of our resources in the time we have left. > > Please let us know your thoughts on this issue. > > Sincerely, Noah Sutherland Team Leader CS481 Team B