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From: fin@UF.MSC.UMN.EDU ("Craig Finseth")
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Comment on RFC1124 (?)
Message-ID: <8909281833.AA28399@uf.msc.umn.edu>
Date: 28 Sep 89 18:33:29 GMT
References: <[A.ISI.EDU]28-Sep-89.07:35:08.CERF>
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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It is probably worth pointing out that Postscript is a representation
targeted to the task of rendering a document as an image.  In itself,
it does not contain enough information to enable a program to
mechanically produce a "reasonable ASCII" form of the document.

Note that is is possible to extend Postcript so as to include this
additional information using comments and/or special operators, but
such a solution is not currently supported.

I would also like to mention that, as the ASCII form will no doubt be
wanted by more than one person, it only makes sense for the original
author to perform such conversion once.  (As an added plus, the author
can then excercise quality control over the ASCII form.)

As the Postscript advantages are more for diagrams than running text,
why not offer a separate .PS file with just the diagrams?  I have seen
this done on several documents around the net, and it works pretty
well.  The following files would then be offered:

	RFCnnnn.TXT	ASCII form as usual, with crude drawings
	RFCnnnnILL.PS	Nice, Postscript versions of the drawings
	RFCnnnn.PS	Postscript form of the whole thing

(Yes, I realize that the ASCII form of the drawings is somewhat
difficult to do and not going to work as well, but in general such
drawings should be only a small fraction of the work involved with
producing the RFC.)

As a test case, could we ask the authors of RFCs 1119 and 1124 to come
up with the ASCII versions?

Craig A. Finseth			fin@msc.umn.edu [CAF13]
Minnesota Supercomputer Center, Inc.	(612) 624-3375