Bill de hÓra

I always thought you guys have a special software to do that kind of formatting...

Is that an AOL icon I see? Yuck!

"Is that an AOL icon I see? "

It is, in deference to some colleagues who are using it until they're assimilated by Jabber.

You just jig the font to fixed-width of the right point size, or setup your margins to get one page per page, no?

Andrew

Andrew,

No. Changing the font size will mean silly sizes when the document is printed and page margins don't work too well either.

No doubt there's a tool for this, but I don't know what it is.

There is an RFC for this: "RFC 3285 - Using Microsoft Word to create Internet Drafts and RFCs" http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3285.html

I agree with Tim in his complaints about RFC's. Plain ASCII text sucks.

PS: Gaim for Windows works just perfectly with the AOL protocol afaik. It works great for Messenger and Jabber, at least.

On the other hand there are good reasons for preferring plain text to other forms of mark-up when it comes to RFCs.

There are advantages to sticking to the same format. Imagine the mess if RFCs created in the 1980s were in TeX and troff, and those created in the 1990s in a mixture of HYTIME, SGML and HTML/0.9, some of which had been hand-converted to XHTML1.0 in 2001 and then mixed in with some WordML examples from 2004. Working out how to read an RFC once you had found it would be very annoying.

As for character sets... not all computers can process documents containing arbitrary Unicode character data, so restricting RFCs to ASCII means they can be read more widely. ASCII is not ideal for reproducing any language (not even English) but it is the most interoperable option.

Fixed-width fonts are a requirement for the block diagrams used in some of the more low-level specifications. Without that you would presumably be struggling with pic or eqn notation instead!

The 66-line layout is a little inconvenient, but again, I think changing it risks making RFCs unavailable on some obscure Unix box somewhere. On the other hand, Unix 'man' pages have finally found a way to suppress the page headers and footers after all these years. You could try finding a friendly Unix user who will print RFCs for you with enscript -L66 -2r ... :-)

Damian,

"The 66-line layout is a little inconvenient"

I guess that's the sum of it for me. If the 66 line break was gone I could just stream this stuff into any older print spool.

Perhaps the best thing to do to rip out the headers and footers pre-printing with a regex hack...

I didn't see a satisfactory answer to why you're not using xml2rfc. Am I missing something?

"I didn't see a satisfactory answer to why you're not using xml2rfc"

Maybe I missed it because it's not called rfc2xml. Will it munge RFCs as ASCII to something usable for print?

In the meantime, I'll be sharpening my sed axe.

Grab draft-ietf-xmpp-core-24.xml from http://www.jabberstudio.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/ietf/.

Process it with the xslt that comes with xml2rfc for HTML output.