Mark, >Ah, fond memories. memories you might like to forget >As suggested, a revision control system would be a huge help. You don't need >anything as fancy as a distributed client/server system--I'm a big fan of >using RCS (possibly in addition to svn) for local revision control.
yes something I am looking to do => I was wondering if there is anyone on the list that had dealt with => troff documents and came across a profiler or some other script or code => highlighter that you could run the document through that would tell you => certain things are missing or out of whack. I had a C profiler at one >Yes: > checknr >Somewhere in the deep recesses of my tar files from my first job (writing Unix >documentation, in 1988) I think I may have a crude equivalent to "lint" for >*roff, written in awk. I'll take a look. Well let me search some archives >Is the expected output in a specific enough form that it could be >machine-parsed? yes. These are flat ASCII troff formatted files. yes if I had the time I could write a parser in Awk and run them through that . >The sanity check could be something as simple as knowing that the output >should be somewhere between 4~8 pages. If you create the document with >"nroff" and grep for the page header or footer, and find that a document >has 1 page of 640 lines, or 350 pages at 2 lines each, for example, >then you've got an automated test that has detected a problem with the >source code (eroff) before producing a hard copy. The reports are not the same length. These are students report cards. Here is the process: 1. Create the base troff document which include custom fields for our system 2. Our system takes this document and then runs it through our "merge" program which reads the doc, replaces what is needed for the fields based on the individual students and spits out the modified troff document which ends up being one large document So the page length for each student can go from 2 pages to 6+ pages based on the student's data. The entire file size or total pages is based on the number of students times the number of pages for each student. These documents get complicated with nested .ie, .el .ie and other combinations. In my 14 years doing this it has always come down to a missing bracket. I am looking for something that would make it easier (aren't we all looking for that). This system is about two years away from being replaced so I am not sure if it is worth writing a parser at this point. I hope I explained this correctly. I don't want to write a tome on here. John J. Boris Sr. JEN-A-SyS Administrator Archdiocese of Philadelphia Chairman Professional IT Community Conference (PICC'12) www.picconf.org _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
