[tex-live] your eqexam package

[Victor Ivrii]

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 7:49 AM, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg at elzevir.fr> wrote:
> Le 09/07/2010 13:37, Victor Ivrii a écrit :
>> On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 7:15 AM, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard <mpg at elzevir.fr> wrote:
>>> A short argument: if for some reason they disappear from the TeX community at
>>> some point and become unreachable (which I obviously don't wish, but experience
>>> proves such things happen), it will be very hard to take over maintenance of
>>> their packages, since the documentation will have to be rewritten basically from
>>> scratch.
>>>
>> Here I disagree: first, content of documentation should not be
>> recreated. For some packages it would be a matter of retyping. DPStory
>> is a completely different story but not because of proprietary fonts
>> (fonts could be replaced) but because recreation of astonishing
>> effects would require very significant efforts. But even in this case
>> it would be less than "from the scratch". Finally, a lazy/time pressed
>>  maintainer can use the original documentation + addendum
>>
> Well, maybe "basically from scratch" was a bit too strong, but surely you'll
> agree that it is much less convenient than editing the source?


Yes, no disagreement here albeit the degree of inconvenience varies
wildly depending on the nature of the document

>
> Manuel.
>
> PS: as a matter of personal experience, I lost files a few month ago, and had
> only a paper copy left from a 40-pages document. I really felt like the source
> is an important thing at this point :-)
>
>

LOL: you think you had a problem? I also had lost the source (almost
hundred of pages). Some of my colleagues had a lot of papers from
pre-computer times and they retyped hundreds of pages. Actually, as
experience shows OCR helps even for mathematical texts: formulae do
not go through but the text is OK (depending how well s/w can find the
border between text and formula). So, formulae were retyped but it
saved some time.

PS I never did it for my old papers: just scanned, converted to djvu
and OCRed all my old papers.




Victor


-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii