[ncc-services-wg] Pre-PDP discussion: "All RIPE documents should be plain text"

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 10:43 PM, Tore Anderson <tore at fud.no> wrote:

> It was just one example. Another would be ripe-566, which has a couple
> of tables. Sure, you can create an ASCII art tables, but doing so and at
> the same time everything below 72 characters of width might not be
> easiest thing in the world. A future document might want to include some
> other figures or other external content which cannot be (easily)
> represented in plain text.

The various TeX flavors can generate PDF/A. I understand that this
would add complexity for people who need to create PDFs. Which may be
a benefit overall as this would result in a stronger incentive to use
plain text. All this while still allowing easily diffed collaboration
on text files in all cases.


> Because once that PDF is the authoritative version it's hard for someone
> else to come along and make changes to it later.

Fair point; see above.


> Reasonably, if you keep the amount of markup to a minimum. The point
> after all isn't to get RIPE documents that are glitzy AJAX Web2.0 HTML5
> interactive stuff, just to allow for the inclusion of basic figures,
> tables, images and a minimum of formatting.

Even then, fonts may get lost over time; that will not happen with
PDF/A which embeds all fonts.

I am not saying we need eternal docs that always look the same, but it
would be nice to have and as we are debating redoing things anyway....



Richard