On 5/24/2013 12:46 PM, Sebastian Kuzminsky wrote: > I've certainly been assuming that we'll stay with Ubuntu, and that we'll > target basically what we're currently building on the buildbot: Hardy sim & > rtai, Lucid sim & rtai, Precise sim, plus any new rtos options we merge.
Since Lucid Desktop, Hardy Desktop, and Hardy Server have all reached end-of-life, I think the users deserve some discussion on the implications of basing their CNC systems on these releases. Even with the EOL issue, I think they should be given at least a high-level overview of the implications of using older vs newer kernels and distributions. As much as I would like to volunteer to write the first draft I'm currently my wife's 24/7 care provider and I just don't see it happening. > <...> > > There are a bunch of minor janitor-level tasks I hope to get into 2.6: > > <...> > > * automatic asciidoc math rendering Along those lines, I was thinking a while ago about how to streamline the documentation process by using a workflow in which the PDF files are generated and then HTML files are generated from the PDF files instead of the bifurcated workflow we have now (ref. my page http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BeyondWikiToo, which I admit may be out of date by now). I'm working from memory here but some of the disadvantages I saw to the current approach are: 1. maintenance of the two uses of asciidoc including disparate stylesheets and processing options. 2. subtle but obvious visual differences between the results in the two formats. 3. the difficulty of presenting mathematics in both formats from the common AsciiDoc source (which may become a moot point with your work). 4. there is a natual one-to-one correspondence between a logical document and its resulting PDF file but an unnatural one-to-many correspondence between it and its resulting XHTML files and supporting files (stylesheets, javascript, image files,etc.). It seems to me HTML5 plus emergence of the open-source pdf2htmlEX package make it possible to consider an alternative workflow. In this workflow, a LinuxCNC document would be rendered in PDF format as before and then the resulting PDF file would be postprocessed by pdf2htmlEX to render the same document in HTML5 format. Some advantages to this alternative workflow are 1. a one-to-one correspondence between a logical document and its HTML5 file just as with PDF 2. tighter visual correspondence between the two renderings with less effort 3. no separate processing of mathematical content (again, perhaps a moot point if you succeed, but still without requiring the separate image files in HTML5). Of course, every silver cloud may contain a dark lining. Some potential disadvantages of the alternative workflow are 1. HTML5-capable browsers are required to view the HTML format. Fortunately, browser developers are being driven by big market forces to broaden their implementations of HTML5 rendering. 2. It's always possible AsciiDoc + some stylesheets may may generate PDF constructs which pdf2htmlEX (or whatever is chosen) can't process. I haven't noticed a problem in trial processing of the major LinuxCNC PDF documents but that doesn't mean none will arise. 3. It introduces yet one more dependency on the work of others. So far, the pdf2htmlEX effort seems quite strong but that doesn't mean it can't die in various ways. 4. the resulting HTML5 files can be big, bigger certainly than their corresponding PDF files, but I consider a single big file a huge advantage over the many small files we have now. 5. There may be some issues with typeface collections (I haven't gotten there yet) To put some meat on the bones of this proposal, I naively (e.g., with no options or tricks) postprocessed the five LinuxCNC 2.5 PDF documents available on the Wiki. At a glance, they looked good for a first effort. Then my wife's medical condition fell precipitously and I've had no time to do a detailed analysis and post my results. I'll try to get them up on my Google Site along with these thoughts and more RSN. This approach may come too late for V2.6 but I hope it or something like it becomes standard in the future. Regards, Kent ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try New Relic Now & We'll Send You this Cool Shirt New Relic is the only SaaS-based application performance monitoring service that delivers powerful full stack analytics. Optimize and monitor your browser, app, & servers with just a few lines of code. Try New Relic and get this awesome Nerd Life shirt! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic_d2d_may _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
