RE: [Axiom-developer] Test of a WEB style

[Bill Page]

On May 4, 2007 6:58 AM Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
> 
> On 05/04/2007 07:28 AM, Bill Page wrote:
> > On May 4, 2007 12:52 AM C Y wrote:
> >> I have created a sample file of a format for pamphlets
> >> that can be generated without needing the noweb style
> >> file (obviously without many of the major features.)  
> >>
> >
 
http://portal.axiom-developer.org/Members/starseeker/cl-web-v0.5-hyperreftes
t.pdf/download

> > 
> > Cliff, I do really like the "look and feel" of this example!
> > It looks pretty and it seems to work.
> 
> I appreciate very much the literate work. That is a very good
> example how literate documents should look like.
> 
> For your convenience I have embellished it a bit.
> 
> http://portal.axiom-developer.org/Members/hemmecke/document.pdf/download
>

The first thing I noticed about this is that when viewing it
in Acrobat reader the PDF does not fit the document margins to
the width of the window. Also the default red boxes around the
links look horrible. There is a hyperref option to control that.
See the following line from Cliff's source:

\usepackage[dvips,final,colorlinks=true,linkcolor=blue,pdfstartview=FitH]{hy
perref}

Also as a matter of personal style I find that I do not like see
large blocks of text with colored backgrounds in PDF and dvi
files. In general I expect these to look more like traditional,
i.e. conservatively-styled, scientific literature. In contrast,
the use of colored background block text in HTML files on the
web seems both more natural and more common. But I freely admit
that this is a style and fashion issue that is subject to
change over time as the format of scientific literature evolves.

But I *do* like the hyper-linking of the identifiers in the
code that you also use extensively in Allprose. I think that
this feature is very important and should not be omitted
simply because some people are motivated to replace noweb
with something written in Lisp.

> (unfortunately the graph has to be adjusted---I am too lazy)
> 
> The sources are here.
> 
> http://portal.axiom-developer.org/Members/hemmecke/cl-web.tar.gz/download

> Simply type
>
> make pdf
>
> or just
>
> make
>
> for the .ps file.
>
> Look also at the generated .dvi file, adjust your dvi viewer
> and click  on it. I have incorporated the inverse search
> facility.

Perhaps this document looks better in dvi format than it does
in a PDF reader? Unfortunately in other respects most dvi
viewers seem rather deficient compared to PDF. I wonder if
there is any way to incorporate inverse search into a PDF
document generated from LaTeX literate program sources?

On May 4, 2007 8:19 AM Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
> ...
>> C Y wrote: 
>> Very nice!  This functionality Ralf might need to be
>> incorporated as a second stage - it needs a lot more of
>> noweb's full strength. I'm shooting for a first cut at a
>> weave functionality entirely defined in Lisp - understanding
>> all of the requirements to handle the extra features is a
>> bigger bite than I have time to chew right now.  Or we
>> could go with this if noweb is present on the system but
>> fall back on the plain Lisp version otherwise.
>
> Oh that would be good. I somehow don't really like to change
> the noweb syntax. Note that some day we might look closer to
> LEO. I don't want to reprogram their ideas only because we
> then use
>
>   \begin{chunk} .. \end{chunk}
>

I agree completely with Ralf on this. While I think the
document you are creating as an example of the kind of target
we want to create from literate program "pamphlet" source is
great, I still do not really understand why you (Cliff and Tim)
want to spend so much time re-inventing noweb in Lisp. noweb
works and it's open source. That is good enough for me to
justify it's use in Axiom. Why not just use it as is - even
internally in Axiom? A commands such as

(1)->  )compile mytest.pamphlet
(1)->  )compile mytest.pamphlet )chunk 'NamedCode'

could be easily made to first use SI::SYSTEM to call notangle
to extract the root or the named code chunk from the pamphlet.
There is no need to write a new Lisp program for this.

I think it would be better incorporate as much of Ralf's
Allprose methods as possible now without changing the
underlying programs.

In the longer term the current approach of web-style markup
in LaTeX documents seems to primitive to me. Rather than
spending resource on re-writing things in Lisp, we should be
looking at more advanced literature programming tools like
Leo. Of course this is an open source project and how you
are motived to spend your time is up to you, but I thought
I would just re-state (once again) more clearly my personal
opinion on this.

Regards,
Bill Page.