Joe, On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 12:31:56PM -0600, Joe Wreschnig wrote: > On Fri, 2002-11-15 at 11:44, Simon Richter wrote: > > 2) Reformatting and Format Conversion: The license must permit > > reformatting and conversion to different file formats, as long as the > > contents of the documents themselves are not changed by this. > I spent about two weeks trying to codify this into a documentation > license a while back (around two GFDL flamewars ago?). I don't think > there's a satisfactory way to make this requirement. Some fileformats > have easy isomorphic transforms (any combinations of XML and SGML). > However, most don't. PDF to text? DocBook to troff? 8859-1 to ASCII? Loss of information doesn't imply changing contents. I used to work with disabled students during my community service year, and spent a lot of my time converting PS files full of mathematical formulae and graphics to text with 21 columns, using a special mathematical notation and braille-art :-) for the graphics. It was a conversion, surely information got lost, but I didn't change the contents, and the authors of the original papers were happy that they could point to me if someone asked about a braille version. When I'm talking about conversions, I don't necessarily mean automated conversions. A lot of them will require at least some manual attention (iso-8859-1 to ASCII has language-dependent rules for conversion, like German "ä -> ae" or Danish "å -> aa"). > There's major lossage involved in all of those format conversions, to > the point where you must change the content. In some cases (say, Quark > to LaTeX) the structures are so incredibly different that I don't see > how you can argue that any conversion between the two is just a > "reformatting". The end user usually does not see whether this is a Quark or LaTeX document, but instead, she gets some preformatted version (this is also true for DFSG free documentation -- most people will prefer the info browser or printing the PS to reading the texinfo source). So while such a conversion would change the structure and everything, it would only slightly change the end user's perception of the document -- if the conversion is done right and the content unchanged. Note that this is only formulated that way to cater for standards (again). Since all descriptive documents (which are the majority) are supposed to be modifiable anyway, this clause won't apply for them, and you just can convert them as you wish. Simon -- GPG Fingerprint: 040E B5F7 84F1 4FBC CEAD ADC6 18A0 CC8D 5706 A4B4
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