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Subject:Re: PDF & single-sourcing history From:Sandy Harris <sandyinchina -at- gmail -dot- com> To:TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 6 Mar 2013 22:44:17 -0500
On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 7:38 PM, Richard Hamilton <dick -at- rlhamilton -dot- net> wrote:
> But I think a judgement on whether this is an example of single sourcing shouldn't depend on the beauty of the result (and I agree it is far from beautiful), but rather on whether they intended to single source, and if so, whether they achieved the desired result. In the case of Unix man pages, they got a useful book and online help from a single source. And as time went on, they were able to generate better and better looking output from that same source. And that same source format is still used on Linux systems for man pages.
>
> I think that qualifies as single sourcing.
I'd say it obviously does. I'm not certain it is the earliest such
system, but it seems certainly one of the early ones, since an earlier
post shows it existed mid-70s.
There were also a number of descendant systems. The FSF came up with
their texinfo system -- high-grade typeset output via TeX and online
browsing via either Emacs or the info browser. The earliest reference
I find is 1986, but I did not search hard. By 1991, Docbook became
available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook
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