ARTHUR OGAWA
TEX Consultants, California
ogawa@teleport.com
Abstract:
Sun Computer intends its JAVA programming language to be the
lingua franca of the World Wide Web. Sun may get their wish: dozens of
books about JAVA are published every year, and there is even
a conference about JAVA, JavaOne, being held in San Francisco
at the same time as this TUG meeting.
If you wanted to publish a book documenting and cross-referencing all the JAVA class libraries (running to 1,000 pages and covering over 1,500 classes, organized into about 70 ``packages'') what would you do? If you are Patrick Chan and Rosanna Lee, you would use JAVA itself to manage the data (about 40Mb of it) and you would use TEX to format your pages.
In my talk, I will describe the criteria for selecting the formatter (i.e., TEX plus macros) for a database typesetting project, the best way of interfacing between TEX and a database engine, and some interesting (perhaps even challenging) features of the formatting work. I will also show how the success of the project enabled the author to make last-minute revisions to the book (changes necessitated by late developments in the JAVA class libraries themselves) even though this involved the reprocessing of all 40Mb of data, in less than 24 hours.