tds-0.9991 technical comments

[Ulrik Vieth]

[tds2texi.el]

> ;;; tds2texi.el --- convert TDS draft from LaTeX to Texinfo
[...]
> ;; Author: Ulrik Vieth <vieth@thphy.uni-duesseldorf.de>
> ;; Maintainer: UV
> ;; Version: $Id: tds2texi.el,v 1.2 1996/11/16 14:28:02 karl Exp $
> ;; Keywords: TDS, LaTeX, Texinfo, Info, HTML, tex, maint

Karl, why don't you add your name and e-mail address as maintainer?

[tds.sed]
> # Things that are too hard to do in Elisp.  Run after tds2texi-convert.
> 
> # Indentation blocks in tdsSummary environments.
> s/ \./ /g
> s/^\.//

Please make sure that the replacement text consists of two spaces not
just one, so that the alignment of the right column remains unaffected. 
Better yet, edit the tds.tex source to make the indentation consistent 
in all tdsSummaries so that the second case becomes unnecessary.

> # Accents (just one, but still).
> s/\\"/@"/

I don't see why this couldn't be done in Elisp (with proper quoting). 
(See `tds2texi-do-simple-tags' how the other tags are handled.)

> # Work around Makeinfo lossage (that is too hard to fix).
> # The @end detailmenu is put in by tds.awk.
> /The Detailed Node Listing/i\
> @detailmenu

Is it really necessary to do this via sed and gawk?  I suppose it
could be handeld in Elisp as well, if you add another function call
just after (texinfo-master-menu nil) in `tds2texi-convert' before
saving the file.  (In that case, you wouldn't have to rely on gawk
when standard "awk" can't handle the job, since gawk might not be 
available on some systems.)


Finally two more requests:

1.) If possible, get rid of the \systemitem tag, which is used only
    once in a refence to an environment variable and could probably 
    be handled using other markup tags, e.g. \literal.

2.) Add an appropriate @dircategory header when doing the texi/info
    conversion.  See `tds2texi-do-header' how the header is constructed.

@dircategory TeX
@direntry
* TeX Directories: (tds).       A directory structure for TeX files.
@end direntry

So much for the technical comments.  I might comment on the contents
later after reading it through.  And I might also look into adding
the missing functionality to tds2texi.el.

Cheers, Ulrik.


P.S.  I just noticed another problem in the LaTeX version, which only
shows up in the DVI file: In the tdsSummary environment for AmiWeb2C,
the trailing colon in "TeXMF:" isn't recognized as a column separator
(unlike the trailing slashes elsewhere).  Apparently, someone has to
hack tdsguide.cls again to handle this.