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Response

From tpearse@boi.hp.com Tue Oct 15 15:49:56 1996
Date: Mon, 14 Oct 1996 15:29:52 -0600
From: Troy Pearse 
To: 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