Subject: rfc page format

From: Marc Blanchet <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:38:12 -0400

Hello,
  I don't want to start a thread, so I'm looking for pointers to a 
discussion about the following. I guess someone is looking into it with 
the RFC editor change process that occured over the last year.

I'm becoming more and more annoyed by the RFC page format, with line 
wrapping, US letter format, page headers, etc... as others said, a 
line-printer format. Printing on paper is often a mess (which is the 
purpose of the current page format), copy/pasting requires removing the 
page headers, etc... Recent discussions on this mailing list about ebook 
readers and formats show that the current format is not great for that 
purpose.

I would highly prefer a free flow txt format. With line numbers on the 
left, as other SDOs are doing, so it is easy to precisely reference. I 
guess that it won't be too difficult to implement with xml2rfc if the 
input is in XML.

Is anyone looking into this?, or no one cares?, or do you have any 
pointer to discussion around this?

Marc.
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From: Brian Rosen <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:52:24 -0500

Why don't you just build a post processor to get what you want, and ask the
tools team to add it to their collection?

Seems easy enough.

One thing that maybe we should start agitating for is to have the RFC editor
post the source file they use to generate the output.  That would help any
post processor wannabe. Today that would be an nroff file.  Tomorrow that
may be an xml2rfc file.

This is probably the wrong list for that discussion however.

Good idea tho: copy/paste source, if nothing else.

Brian

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From: Lars Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:31:58 -0700

On 2010-3-17, at 12:38, Marc Blanchet wrote:
> left, as other SDOs are doing, so it is easy to precisely reference.

I don't quite know how "free-flow" and "line numbers" go together, but do you mean something like:

rfcstrip <file> | nl

http://trac.tools.ietf.org/tools/rfcstrip/

Lars

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From: Marc Blanchet <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:19:26 -0400

> http://trac.tools.ietf.org/tools/rfcstrip/

thanks! That what I was looking for. (IMHO, the native txt format should 
be the "output of rfcstrip". but I guess that is another discussion).

case closed.

Marc.

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:52:06 -0400

--On Wednesday, March 17, 2010 15:38 -0400 Marc Blanchet
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>...
> I would highly prefer a free flow txt format. With line
> numbers on the left, as other SDOs are doing, so it is easy to
> precisely reference. I guess that it won't be too difficult to
> implement with xml2rfc if the input is in XML.
>...

Marc,

Just a question to clarify your preference, not to start a
debate:

"Line numbers on the left" implies hard "lines" and line
delimiters, which are usually considered incompatible with "free
flow text".   They are usually also the worst sort of annoyance
if one wants to extract text by copying, far worse than the
occasional page headers and footers you complain about.   The
majority of SDOs (and law firms and others) who like line
numbers intend their documents to be read and studied.  In
general, they give less priority to having people perform
extraction or copying operations then we have historically done
and which your note seems to ask be optimized and would actually
consider "hard to extract text from" to be a feature.

So, could you clarify what you are asking for given your earlier
note and those tradeoffs?

    john