Re: Diagrams (Was RFCs should be distributed in XML)

[Jari Arkko <jari.arkko at piuha.net>]

Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> What I find strange about this, though, is the reluctance to adopt
> PDF.  It's a well-known open standard.  There are plenty of free
> software interpreters and writers around, and Ghostscript passed the
> threshold for good output 2 or 3 versions ago.  I understand the
> difficulty of machine parsing, but wouldn't an XML format with human
> oriented output in PDF be nice?  (I suppose I'm asking whether
> there's some historical flamewar over this that I managed never to
> look at, in which case I'll just keep my mouth shut.)
>  
There is. Lets not reopen the format flame war. However,
just for the record we DO have .pdf as a format that you
can submit Internet Drafts and as something that you
also get from the RFC Editor. It is required that a text
format be also provided, which I think is natural and
useful. Some of the PDF documents that people have
used have contained illustrations such as state machines.
See for instance this RFC
  ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc4137.pdf
and for some tool support take a look at
  http://www.arkko.com/tools/xml2pdfrfc.html

> Of course, even if that was solved, the features of Word that other
> like are not really available in most of the XML tools, AFAIK. 
>  
I kind of like the rfcdiff feature in text format more
than the word features.

--Jari


_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf at ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf