Chemical structures with plain TeX

[Peter Flynn]

I have known Phil for many years, and while we may spar over OS 
differences, his criticisms are always worth listening to.

\begin{OT}
FWIW

wget retrieves a URI from the command line or within a script so that it 
can be stored for reference or used.in.further processing.

tidy sanitises a HTML file,.cleans it up, removes errors and infelicities 
of markup, and turns it into well-formed XHTML so that it can be processed 
by XML-conformanr software.

lxprintf extracts some item[s] of content from an XML document and formats 
them using a printf()-like format statement. It's part of the LTXML2 
toolkit from the Language Technology.Group.at Edinburgh University, and 
includes lxgrep (Unix grep for XML.documents), lxreplace, lxsort, and lots 
of others.

\end{OT}

Peter

On 6 July 2019 04:05:29 Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:

> On 2019-07-05 at 11:38:45 -0700, Shreevatsa R wrote:
>
> > For instance, "wget -O -" could be written as "wget
> > --output-document=-" or even "wget --output-document=/dev/stdin".
> > Similarly, "tidy -n -i" could be written as "tidy -numeric
> > -indent".  And "grep -v" as "grep --invert-match".  I think very
> > few people prefer to write the longer versions though.
>
> I prefer short option names on the command line but the longer
> versions in scripts.  I suppose that this was the basic idea of
> getopt_long(3).
>
> Peter just said what he typed on the command line.  One cannot expect
> that he uses long versions only to discharge people from reading the
> manuals.  I think that everybody should be grateful for Peter's
> response and shouldn't complain because the solution looks
> incomprehensible at a first glance.
>
> > Given that wget, tidy, lxprintf etc are all separate programs
> > written by unrelated programmers with their own conventions for
> > specifying options, I think one is not expected to know what a
> > specific option to a specific command/program means by simply
> > reading it; it must be looked up in the corresponding program's
> > manual.
>
> I have to read the manuals anyway because I never used "tidy" and
> "lxprintf" before.  Hence long option names are not helpful at all
> until I know what these programs are actually supposed to do.  And if
> I have to consult the manuals it doesn't make any difference whether
> short or long option names are used.
>
> Presumably Phil is pissed off because Peter's solution requires Unix,
> the system he hates so much.  This is not a good precondition for a
> fruitful discussion.
>
> Regards,
>  Reinhard
>
> --
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> Reinhard Kotucha                            Phone: +49-511-3373112
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