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Imprint No 04
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I M P R I N T
The Newsletter of Digital Typography
Volume 1 Number 4
Contents copyright (c) 1997 by Robert A. Kiesling
and the contributors of IMPRINT.
All rights reserved.
To subscribe, send news, or comment, email to:
imprint@macline.com
In this issue:
E-Text publishing means more than just the FAQs.
Text searches with UNIX grep(1) and find(1).
HTML Vocabulary 1.8 for Mac: a complete, low-cost reference.
How to use DOS TAR and GZIP to unpack UNIX archives.
TeX Live 2: CD-based TeX for the whole crew.
ArabTeX 3.05 is now at your favorite CTAN site.
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From the Editor: Of Archives, Translations, and HTML Editions.
Our readership is growing, and we are facing a steadily worsening
crisis in fulfilling back issues requests. At present, requests for
back issues comprise approximately one-half of our e-mail traffic.
John Allen, the administrator of macline.com, and I are looking at
ways to make the IMPRINT archive accessible via the World-Wide Web.
There is a HTML Version of IMPRINT in the works. It will be included
in Debian GNU/Linux, the principle public domain Linux distribution.
The Debian GNU/Linux distribution is a complete operating system
development project which is actively supported by the Free Software
Foundation. In the next release, Debian maintainers plan to upgrade
their documentation to HTML format. Of course, IMPRINT is pleased to
be a part of this project. There will be a link from our Debian
GNU/Linux Home Page to the IMPRINT library if we can make it
accessible to the Internet at large.
In the meantime, we will happily fulfill your back issues requests.
All you need to do is send us a message. There may be a one- or
two-day delay as we catch up with our e-mail traffic, though.
Finally, we would like to provide foreign-language editions of
IMPRINT. German seems to be an obvious first choice for a translated
edition. Unfortunately, my German is not up to speed for the project.
I actually translate too slowly to make a German-language edition
possible. (Or do any other professional translation, for that
matter.) If you have skills in this area, kindly drop me a line at
imprint@macline.com, and we'll message.
Thank you and happy reading,
Robert Kiesling
Editor, IMPRINT
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E-Text publishing means more than just the FAQs.
E-Text isn't about typography, per se, but it's where much typography
begins. It's been pointed out that publishing a Frequently Asked
Questions document (a FAQ, natch) in the Usenet news.answers news
group has become a minimum standard for electronic publication.
Whether you agree or not, the FAQ has become an important electronic
text genre.
E-Text as a whole is one of those phenomena that futurists are always
predicting will be popular in x plus ten years, the "x" being now.
Then suddenly, these phenomena spring fully-blown into the cultural
consciousness, seemingly from nowhere. It's like waking up in the
fast lane of the Santa Monica freeway from a good night's sleep.
You can, of course, post your article to bulletin board systems,
various Usenet news groups, and archive sites. But the news.answers
group is one of the most popular venues on the 'Net. There is as much
cultural information as technical. Article subjects range from
autopsies to Ayn Rand to Aztec calendars. News.answers is required
reading for any reasonably informed 'Net junkie.
News.answers is a moderated news group. There are people who referee
what appears there. When posting, potential articles are sent to the
moderators, who either approve of the article and send it on to the
'Net, or disapprove it, in which case the poster must modify the
article and send it back.
You can post to news.answers without having your article approved by
the moderators. However, having your article officially sactioned has
several benefits. Your articles get archived at rtfm.mit.edu, and you
can have the news group's FAQ server post the article for you at
regular intervals.
Much of the moderating of news.answers takes place mostly at the
formal level. If you can type a plain-text, ASCII document which
meets the group's formatting requirements and the loosely-defined
decency standards of the Internet community as a whole, you can have
your FAQ published there. We'll discuss posting "approved" articles
in a moment.
Chris Lewis, clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca, has written a minimal digest
format, which is a simplified form of the RFC1153 Digest Format. RFC
documents are the "official" standards documents of protocols for 'Net
at large. See the bibliography at the end of this article for the
article's URL, and the URLs of other documents mentioned here.
The minimal digest format is recognized by many common news readers,
and it is upwardly compatible with Digest-to-HTML translators.
A FAQ "section", in Lewis' simplified format, consists of:
<blank line>
<string of 30 hyphens>
<blank line>
Subject: <subject line>
<additional optional RFC822-like headers>
<blank line>
<text>
The string of hyphens and "Subject:" must begin in column 1. The text
following the header may be free-formatted any way you want.
Indexed subject formats are also common. They are not recognized by
news readers or e-mail software, so you can't use them as message
headers. But maintaining a consistent format in the Table of Contents
and section headings (as IMPRINT does) allows readers to search easily
for the headings.
Meta-references, more commonly known as Universal Resource Locators
(URLs), must have a consistent style as well. The following format is
recommended for FTP references.
ftp://<inet>/<str>/<str>/
Here "inet" is the domain name of the FTP server. Similarly, a
reference to a WWW document is
http://<inet>/<str>/<str>/.
Meta-references can be broken out from the text, as above, or included
in the body, as in ftp://<inet>/<str>/<str>/.
If you want your article to be approved by news.answers moderators,
you need to do several things. First, you need to compose your
article's header with the usual items of an RFC822-standard message,
as well as additional items required by the news.answers automated FAQ
server. These are the strictest guidelines of the entire process.
They're necessary so that your FAQ can be handled with a minimum of
human intervention.
The header of a news.answers posting contains the following lines.
Optional items are noted.
Newsgroups:
Subject:
Followup-To:
From:
Summary:
Archive-name:
Posting-Frequency: (OPTIONAL)
Last-modified: (OPTIONAL)
Then, news.answers moderators recommend sending your article to their
automated FAQ-checker, which scans the format. If your posting is
formatted correctly, it is sent along to the moderators. If it isn't,
you will get it back with an explanation of what's wrong.
The FAQ-checker doesn't understand MIME. You need to send the posting
as regular E-mail. Put the entire FAQ, including the header, in the
message. Then send it to
news-answers-submit@rtfm.mit.edu.
A full description of the submission process is described in the
news.answers Guidelines. You can also get a pretty good idea of what
is required in each element of the header by scanning a few of the
existing FAQs in news.answers.
There are many sources of further information for E-Text documents.
RFC documents are archived at
ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/Internet/RFC/.
The file ftp://ftp.etext.org/pub/Internet/RFC/rfc-index.txt provides
bibliographic information for the complete RFC library. RFCs of
particular interest for E-Text publishing are:
RFC822 "Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages."
RFC1153 "Digest Message Format."
RFC1630 "Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW: A Unifying Syntax for
the Expression of Names and Addresses of Objects on the
Network as used in the World-Wide Web."
The following FAQs contain useful information.
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/Usenet/news.answers/faqs/minimal-digest-format
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/Usenet/news.answers/faqs/about-faqs
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/Usenet/news.answers/news-answers/guidelines
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/Usenet/news.answers/news-answers/introduction
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/Usenet/news.answers/news-answers/
postapproval-guidelines
Due to the nature of the medium, E-Text is more fluid than hard-copy
publication. Less historical baggage confronts E-Text authors than
does their hard-copy counterparts. The rules for the genre are still
being written, but don't throw away your copy of "The Elements of
Style" just yet. The rules of good writing still apply.
Someday, somebody is going to write a definitive style guide for
E-Text publishing, which will help to standardize the genre. Then we
can expect our E-Texts to be followed -- of course -- by the
ubiquitous E-Critics.
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Text searches with UNIX grep(1) and find(1).
The complexity of UNIX text tools makes even the simplest text search
into a major chore. Because of the flexibility and power of UNIX
system software, the easiest approach may not always be obvious. One
simple solution is to combine find(1), which searches file systems for
filenames that match to users' search criteria, and grep(1), which
searches the contents of files for matching string patterns.
These tools together can reduce the programming effort required for
searches to a single command line, and with some basic scripting can
make an easy-to-use, yet flexible text-search utility.
When find(1) locates the name of a file that matches a user's search
criteria, it can perform any number of actions on the file. By
default, find(1) prints the name of the file and the path to it. This
is about the simplest form of the find(1) command.
If I am looking for a file which is named TERM-PAPER.TEX, I give the
command
> find . -name TERM-PAPER.TEX
which searches the current directory (the "." is shorthand for the
current directory) and its subdirectories for the file(s) with the
name "TERM-PAPER.TEX", then prints their names and paths.
Now that we know where the file is, we can search the text within the
file using grep(1). You can, of course, search each file manually,
or, with find's output redirected to a file, do a little scripting to
grep(1) each matching filename, and print grep's output.
If we want to search for the string "Sartre" in TERM-PAPER.TEX, the
command we would use is:
> grep Sartre TERM-PAPER.TEX
That is, we give the pattern we want to search for, and the file
specification of the files we want searched. Grep will not, however,
search recursively through file systems -- its searches are limited to
the current directory only.
Remember, though, that find(1) does search directory hierarchies. It
also performs user-specified actions on the files it locates. The
action we want is -exec. This executes a user-specified program
using, optionally, the name of the find(1) match.
The find(1) command, with grep(1), becomes:
> find . -name TERM-PAPER.TEX -exec grep Sartre {}
The final braces of the command tail expand to the current find(1)
match. In this case, that's "TERM-PAPER.TEX". In effect, find(1)
itself executes the command, "grep Sartre TERM-PAPER.TEX".
The command line above will give us essentially what we want, except
that now we must explicitly tell find(1) that we want to print the
name of its latest match. Otherwise, we will simply see grep's
output, which does not include the name of the file being grepped!
So, we need to add explicitly the -print action to find's command
line, separated by a semicolon. The semicolon must be escaped so the
shell itself doesn't interpret it as a command separatator and passes
the full command tail to find(1):
> find . -name TERM-PAPER.TEX -exec grep Sartre {} \; -print
If we want to search ALL of the files in a directory hierarchy for
"Sartre", we can omit the -name specifier. Find(1) then matches
everything in the directory hierarchy.
> find . -exec grep Sartre {} \; -print
This works for files, but grep(1) hangs up on the names of directories
and symbolic links, which we don't want to search anyway. We can add
a search criterion, however, to specify that find(1) matches only
legitimate files, the "-type f" option.
> find . -type f -exec grep Sartre {} \; -print
Finally we can add some niceties, like a few lines of context for each
match of "Sartre", and the line number in the file where each
occurrence is found.
> find . -type f -exec grep -2 -n Sartre {} \; -print
If we want to put this into a shell script, we substitute the
appropriate command line parameter for "Sartre", enclosed in quotes so
grep(1) expands it, instead of find(1). While we're at it, we'll pipe
the output through less(1), to prevent the output from scrolling off
the screen.
> find . -type f -exec grep -2 -n "$1" {} \; -print | less
Much of the complexity of grep(1) and find(1) is caused by the fact
that they are general-purpose tools. You need only look at the
respective man pages to see the confusing array of options which each
of these commands accepts.
With a little effort, though, you can perform complex searches with
the sophisticated and possibly neglected software that is already
resident on your system.
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HTML Vocabulary 1.8 for Mac: a complete, low-cost reference.
You won't find a better deal than HTML Vocabulary 1.8 in any
bookstore. This shareware language reference for the Macintosh comes
packaged as DialogMaker text, which is close enough in format to
DocMaker or Acrobat Reader browsers, that most users can wade right in
and begin using it.
HTML Vocabulary's author, Carl Ba\"ackstr\"om, carl.backstrom@gfk.se,
says HTML Vocabulary is intended to document every HTML tag in
existence, including cascading style sheets, which allow documents to
inherit the properties of their parent documents, object-oriented
style. The vocabulary documents HTML 2.0 and 3.0, as well as tags
that are specific to Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet
Explorer.
The documentation of each tag is specified by a complete Extended
Backus Naur-like syntax, and a complete explanation of what each
element of the tag represents.
For example, a Paragraph tag is documented as:
<P [ALIGN=LEFT|RIGHT|CENTER|JUSTIFY]>
Stands for 'paragraph'. Use it to start a new paragraph. Use
ALIGN to start the line in the left, right or center part of
the page. Justify makes straight margins. <P> can end with </P>,
but it's optional. ALIGN=JUSTIFY is an Explorer extension. (IE)
The body text of HTML Vocabulary is formatted exactly like the HTML
text you would find on a Web page, so you should have no difficulty
integrating the reference with your authoring environment. The
chapter and tag heads in the reference could be cited as actual
document anchors, in fact.
It is also possible to cut-and-paste HTML tag documentation via the
clipboard, but the lack of CRs as line endings makes the formatting
more problematic. This is not insurmountable, however.
Having said that, you can easily justify adding HTML Vocabulary 1.8 to
your authoring repertoire. It isn't intended to be a tutorial.
Instead, it's a complete supplement to your existing HTML
documentation in a convenient format.
You can retrieve the latest version of HTML Vocabulary 1.8 from
http://www.calles.pp.se
http://www.calles.pp.se/nisseb/.
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How to use DOS tar and gzip to unpack UNIX archives.
I had been planning to write a piece on installing RCS, the UNIX
revision control system, under MS-DOS (tm), but once I started writing
the article, I realized that constructing a Real-Mode DOS system which
is based on UNIX software from the ground up is simply too involved
for one article. The old saying, "If you build it, they will come,"
probably applies here.
If you like, you can consider this the second article in IMPRINT's
"DUNIX" (Dos uNIX) Series, the first article being the CAWF text
formatter project which appeared in IMPRINT Vol. 1 No. 3. CAWF comes
pre-packaged as a DOS ZIP archive. The installation of other UNIX and
UNIX-like utilities is more involved, and often requires that you
unpack actual UNIX software archives.
The standard UNIX archiving tools on the 'Net today are tar(1) and
gzip(1). Gzip(1) compresses files, just like the commercial PKZIP,
but it is public domain and only works on one file at a time. Gzip(1)
has become an Internet data compression standard nevertheless, because
UNIX provides the tar(1) (tape archiver) program to archive
directories to disk files and tapes.
You can find DOS versions of the gzip(1) and tar(1) programs at a few
different place on the 'Net, including
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/systems/ibmpc/gnuish/gnutar.zip
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/systems/ibmpc/gnuish/gzip124x.zip
Because these utilities are distributed by the Free Software
Foundation, they come with the source code. You'll see an archive,
ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/systems/ibmpc/gzip124s.zip also, but you
won't need it unless you're going to recompile the program yourself.
Tar(1) and gzip(1) come packaged as standard DOS archives. You can
unpack them using any version of PKUNZIP. You must use the -D command
line switch when unpacking them to re-create the directory hierarchies
of the original archives. In your top-level directory, you would give
the commands
> PKUNZIP -D GNUTAR.ZIP
> PKUNZIP -D GZIP124X.ZIP
which unpacks the two archives.
In each instance, look at the files README and README.1ST. Gnutar
comes with the source code included in the archive. You will,
however, need to move the executable program, TAR.EXE, to a directory
along your search path, like C:\DOS or C:\BIN. The GZIP.EXE file
comes in three varieties, an executable for DOS Real Mode, a
386-specific binary, and an OS/2 binary. Move the appropriate
executable to a directory in your search path.
Gzip(1) comes with the manual page, but tar(1) does not. It comes
with a texinfo (.TEX) file, which is pretty useless unless you have
texinfo, makeinfo, and the info browser already installed on your DOS
machine.
There's no UNIX man page readily available for tar(1), so I'll run
through a few of the basic commands here. These commands will do 95
percent of the things you'll ever need tar(1) for. To extract a UNIX
archive, which might have the extension ".tar.gz", you first need to
decompress the file with gzip(1). The command to do this is
> GZIP -D <whatever>
When transferring a file to DOS, however, the filename may have been
truncated. The easiest way to cope with this is to rename it to
something DOS accepts, and give it the extension .TAZ or .TGZ. These
are the common DOS equivalents to ".tar.gz". The "gzip -d" command
above is commonly mapped to "gunzip" on many UNIX systems. You can
probably do the same with a DOS batch file.
When GUNZIP is finished, you should have a file with the extension
.TAR. To uncompress the tarfile, a commonly used command is
> TAR XVF <filename>.TAR
The options "XVF" mean "extract," "verbose," and "file," respectively.
The last option is necessary, because tar(1) also works on magnetic
tape archives, which don't concern us. Note that TAR does not use
a hyphen ("-") to identify its options, so order is significant when
typing TAR commands.
Creating a TAR archive is a two-step process. First, the archive
needs to be created.
> TAR CF ARCHIVE.TAR
Then the files can be added to the archive.
> TAR RVF ARCHIVE.TAR <directory-or-filespec>
Tar will pack the directory or files you specify, and any files in
subdirectories, while preserving the original directory structure.
The TAR file is not compressed, however. It only combines the files.
To compress it, use GZIP again.
> GZIP ARCHIVE.TAR
And presto! You have a compressed archive, UNIX style.
Finally, to view the contents of a TAR file, the command to use is
> TAR TF ARCHIVE.TAR
If someone knows of a relatively accessible tar(1) manual page,
kindly let us know so we can pass it along to our readers, or a
human-readable version of the texinfo files. We'll probably get
around to talking about using the texinfo documentation system with
DOS (and the Macintosh) sometime in the future.
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TeX Live 2: CD-based TeX for the entire crew.
If there weren't already enough reason to join a TeX User Group (not
forgetting that they are very nice to upstart competitors like
IMPRINT), the TeX Live 2 CD-ROM, distributed by the U.S. TeX User
Group in TugBoat Vol. 18#2, and the U.K. TeX Users' Group in
Baskerville, is one more incentive.
TeX Live 2 emphasizes UNIX TeXes, but Mac and Windows implementations
are represented, too.
It should be noted that TeX Live 2 is not simply a CD-ROM version of a
CTAN archive. The majority of TeX Live 2 is a stand-alone, UNIX TeX.
TeX Live 2 can be run directly from a CD-ROM. In Baskerville, the
UKTUG journal, Sebastian Rahtz, srahtz@elsevier.co.uk, provides an
overview of setting up the CD for a Linux system, configuring PATH
statements and parallel, writable directory trees for local
modifications. It is easy to imagine that the CD could supply a group
of networked hosts from a single CD-ROM drive. If you can live with
the slower speed of a CD compared to a hard drive, you can realize big
savings in disk space and a reduction in system administration
headaches.
This only applies to the UNIX TeXes. The DOS TeXes MikTeX and emTeX,
and CMacTeX and OzTeX for the Mac, need to be unpacked to a hard
drive, as with the standard distributions.
TeX Live 2 is probably one of the more complete available. It is
approximately the size of teTeX, for example, and an order of
magnitude more complete than CMacTeX. The CD would likely pay for
itself in the time saved by not assembling the files piecemeal from
CTAN archives.
In terms of sheer megabytes, TeX Live 2 occupies 8 MB per binary
distribution (see below), 1 megabyte of distribution fonts and
sources, and 10 MB of documentation. A comparison with teTeX is
unavoidable. The LaTeX classes and documentation trees are very
similar. TeX Live 2 is its own animal, though. It comes with a wider
array of binaries and shell scripts, and metafont sources and TFM
files.
TeX Live 2 implements TeX, LaTeX, and friends, for the following
operating system and hardware platforms:
Alpha: Linux
OSF 3.2
HP: HPUX 9.05, 10.20
i386: Linux
Win32
i586: FreeBSD 2.2
i686: Linux
Next: NextStep 3
MIPS: Irix 4.0.5, 5.3, 6.3
RS6000: AIX 3.2.5, 4.1.1
Sparc: Linux
Solaris 2.4, 2.5
SunOS 4.1.3
Additionally, you get the usual support packages including BibTeX,
MakeIndex, metafont, and ghostscript. The CD also includes a myriad
of public domain fonts, including Computer Modern in a dazzling
variety of resolutions, AMS, Knappen, Adobe, Bitstream, and URW.
There are TFM files for Adobe, Bitstream, Compugraphic, and URW
commercial fonts. Public-domain, Type 1 fonts come with the PFB font
files. The CD provides metafont sources for Arabic, Devanagari,
Croation, Cyrillic, and a host of other scripts.
For DVI output, only HP Laserjet, PostScript (tm), and fax drivers are
included. The inclusion of dvips and ghostscript compensates for
this, but the version of ghostscript which is included must be run
under the X Windows System. If you're operating with character-based
terminals, you can use existing DVI drivers and dvi2tty, or a non-X
version of ghostscript for previewing and printing.
Configuration and installation of TeX Live 2 shouldn't be any more
difficult than` other TeXes. In fact, it should be significantly
easier, since the distribution comes to you pre-installed in its
directory tree.
It should be noted that installing and configuring any TeX
implementation is a large project. TeX Live 2 is larger than most.
The instructions that come with TeX Live 2 are geared towards
experienced TeX users. Most of the site-specific instructions are
installation notes. Although texinfo files for Plain TeX and LaTeX
are included, this is not an implementation that first-time installers
are going to feel comfortable with. You should have a systems wizard
on hand to integrate the CD with your site's directory structures, and
you'll probably need some guidance to set up your local TeX and LaTeX
formats if you don't have them already.
One of the best things about TeX Live 2, after its network abilities,
is that it maintains the standard UNIX TeXes' ease of customization.
It is possible to systematically customize this system for your site's
needs without having to rebuild the entire installation.
If you're looking for a serious TeX implementation, you would need to
search pretty hard to find a better deal than TeX Live 2. For the
price of a TeX Users' Group membership, the CD's costs is easy to
justify on its own merits, and then throwing in all of the other TUG
benefits for free.
For more information, the U.S. TeX User Group can be reached at
tug-office@mail.tug.org.
The U.K. TeX Users' Group can be reached at
uktug-enquiries@tex.ac.uk.
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ArabTeX 3.05 is now at your favorite CTAN site.
Probably unique in the TeX world is ArabTeX, whose author, Klaus
Lagally, lagally@informatik.uni-stuttgart.de, says that although
there's still room for improvement in the ArabTeX package, the current
version can be found at
ftp://ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pub/arabtex/.
ArabTeX is also available on the CTAN network at
ftp://~CTAN/languages/arabic/.
ArabTeX extends TeX and LaTeX by typesetting ASCII transliterations
into Arabic. It provides macros for TeX and LaTeX, and the nash14 PK
font.
ArabTeX is free for scientific and non-commercial use. Commercial
installations require a site license, which is available from the
author.
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To SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE to IMPRINT, send a brief,
human-readable message to imprint@macline.com.
IMPRINT is copyright (c) 1997 by Robert A. Kiesling and its
individual contributors. IMPRINT may be freely distributed
provided this copyright notice is included. Individual stories
are copyrighted by their respective authors.
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