Software Tools Meeting Minutes ============================== (2 August 1995) Present: Al Jonchkeere, John Hobbs, Serban Protopopescu, Pushpa Bhat, Stu Fuess, Qizhong Li-Demarteau Scribe: Qizhong Li-Demarteau o Report on Document/News management - Alan Jonckheere o Report on Text editing - John Hobbs o Discussions on the above items - all 1) We discussed about our meeting time and agreed that we will meet on Wednesday morning bi-weekly. (Becky/Patti informed me that the room SALLE DES HEROS is reserved for Software tools meeting every other week. 10:30 - 11:30am.) 2) Document/News Management: Alan Jonckheere reported on the infomation he collected for Document/News management from WWW. There are many good articles and reference cards which can be found starting at: http://wwwcn.cern.ch/ and http://consult.cern.ch/ Alan recommends that Tex and Latex should still be the main tools to write documents. There was some discussion of this point. John Hobbs pointed out that and use TEX2HTML to convert it to html files. The advantage of the html's: - searchable for key words - has links Both Tex and Latex are free software, which cost $0.00. But DVIVIEWER needs to be paid for each machine. John Hobbs noted that we may want to have up to *three* versions of all files posted to the WEB: Post Script for almost universal printing; HTML to support links etc; Text to support full text searching. NOTE added: Adam Para claims to have seen a product that allows text searches in PostScript files. He also points out that WWW allows extremely powerful custom processing. By writting a few scripts and supplying EXEs on the server nodes almost anything can be done through WWW. You could run your analysis code that way :-) Alan will follow up on this ASAP. For the News management, Alan told us that the D0NEWS was modeled after NEWSGROUPS on UNIX. In fact VAXNEWS (the generic name for which D0News is a flavor) is able to post directly to newsgroups. When we move from VAX to UNIX we need only setup a D0 specific newsgroup. There are a large number of newsreaders available, both commercial and freeware, to suit any taste or budget. There seems to no mechanism for broadcasting notification of new NEWSGROUP messages on UNIX though it might be possible to create some special process to do so. MAIL has the same problem, but in this case, there are straight forward methods of getting such notification. Alan suggests we transfer some fraction (useful ones) of D0NEWS messages from VAX to UNIX. We need to think about how to organize D0NEWS in a better way. 3) John Hobbs listed x--> HTML converters he has found: (* ==> John has used/seen this) latex2html* ps2html rtf2html* - RTF (rich text format) of word and others RTF2html wp2html - word perfect frame2html xroff2html decw2html - dec write docu2html - runoff? qk2html - quark express txt2html man2html* - Unix man page power point - early stages c,c++,fortran - many available 4) Text Editing: John Hobbs reported on the text editing. John compared different editors/programs in the following table. Systems Extensible | Lang. Program | Sgi/Unix VMS NT Mac| Cost($)| (D0 Already?) | Sens. ----------|--------------------|--------|---------------|----- Eve/TPU | ? Y ? | 0-350 | Y(Y) | P | | | | Emacs | Y Y Y | 0 | Y(P) | Y | | | | Brief | Y | 100 | Y(N) | Y | | | | ----------|--------------------|--------|---------------|----- | | | | TeX... | Y Y Y Y | 0-500 | Y(P) | N | | | | Word | E Y Y | 0-500 | Y(N) | ? | | | | W Perfect| ?/Y Y Y | 0-500 | Y(N) | | | | | Frame | Y/Y Y Y |600-1000| Y(N) | | | | | ----------|--------------------|--------|---------------|----- Key: Y - yes N - not available (=NO) E - requires emulator P - partial ? - possibly, but need more information (John Hobbs's notes: I generally considered Eve/TPU as the basic standard. If an editor didn't have the capability of eve, I didn't consider it. Hence, both edt and vi are missing.) John recommends emacs for code editing, tex or (.ps/.html/.txt) for D0 notes and tex for papers. The .ps file is easy for printing and the .html file is easy for accessing. The emacs editor has already have some D0 extension (added by John Hobbs). For example, standard headers (^c^h) , D0 library source (^z^e) and D0 .zeb files (^z^z). The editor emacs is highly language sensetive, for example, automatic indenting, keyword expansion, bracket checking, compilation. It also has many other features, like uscnet news reading, mail system, name completion, directory reading and etc. It is extensible to LISP. The emacs editor also has fermilab standard distribution. But users need to learn a new command set (ala EVE/EDT). John uses emacs to edit almost everything. He has a lot of experience with it and happy with it. He would like to know what kind of other D0 extensions are needed in emacs, so that he will add them to the editor. Alan suggests to have some D0 standards for code editing.