[Axiom-developer] Pamphlet structure ideas

[C Y]

--- root <address@hidden> wrote:

> But we haven't even figured out how we plan to handle multiple
> embedded \usepackage lines, hyperlinks, indexing, bibtex,
> animated gifs, or video clips.

Is this a topic of current interest?  I confess it fell off of my radar
screen somewhat, but I do have some ideas I would like to explore.

hyperlinks I think are fairly well addressed by hyperref - maybe a bit
of extension work is needed, but it solves the basic problem at least.

indexing is a bit more of a challenge.  To the best of my knowledge
most indicies are created by humans, since no automatic tool can do a
"context" sensitive indexing.  Since that might prove a bit impractical
for us, we probably need to look into other alternatives.  Some useful
tools might include:
http://www.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/addindex.html
http://www.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/splitindex.html

I would suggest the following, at least:  a "human generated" list of
key words related to specific topics of interest as the general index,
a "Categories and Domains" index of all such definitions, and perhaps
an Authors index as well.

BibTeX I already did some work with using the packages prepared by the
ToC guys http://theoryofcomputing.org/ (the eprint package), which is
available here: 
http://portal.axiom-developer.org/Members/starseeker/axiombibliographysystem.tar.gz/file_view
It's not very pretty and would need to be strengthened/cleaned up
considerably before being ready for prime time, but I think it did
address some of the original goals for the bibliography.  I don't know
if anyone else agrees with me on the desirability of using MSC2000 and
PACS to make a large scale summary of all works referenced in Axiom by
topic, but I did produce a proof-of-concept document with a limited set
of examples:
http://portal.axiom-developer.org/Members/starseeker/axiombibliography.pdf/file_view

No clue how to deal with animated gifs.

Movies and 3D however have an interesting alternative.  There is a
package called movie15 for LaTeX which can embed some interesting
content in pdf files.  I don't know how many pdf viewers support these
abilities yet, but the U3D file format mentioned here is an interesting
idea for a graphics output target in Axiom and I have been able to view
such a file successfully in Acrobat Reader on Linux in the past.  The
standard document for this format is here:
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-363.htm
and the movie15 page is here:
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/movie15.html

An obvious problem is how to get this and pstricks to play nice, but it
may be worth looking into.  Perhaps dvipdf could be extended to handle
it the same way it can handle hyperref.

> I think that we need to lift our eyes away from "what is" and focus
> a bit on the future. It is too early to state that noweb is THE
> format that will carry us onward. Drag-and-drop allows dragged files
> to be exported in more than one format which may require additional
> support within the pamphlet file structure. Pamphlet files need to 
> consider cases of standalone, embedded (e.g. as book chapters), and 
> conflated (collections of partial sections into "topical booklets"
> that slice "across pamphlets" such as an ALL-MATRIX booklet")
> files which the document command might produce.

For this I think the first thing to explore is this LaTeX package:
http://www.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/combine/

I don't know how well it does in practice but conference proceedings
would seem to face many problems similar to the ones we do.

> The 30-year-horizon won't be reached by limiting our imagination
> to our current tools. Research projects demand experimentation,
> not standardization. The question of what is a valid pamphlet
> file requires definition, not standardization. We need to be able
> to expand, extend, and warp the definition as we learn, not fix
> on a trivial preprocessing tool as "the standard". 

However, by the same token we hope to have a HUGE body of work written
in this file format - for those files to remain maintainable and
relevant over time, we need to have most of the fundamentals down
before large scale (re)writing takes place.  At the very least, changes
should be such that they can be applied automatically in most cases to
update files without human intervention.  That means many of these
issues should be resolved sooner rather than later.

Cheers,
CY

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