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Re: rman (PolyglotMan)



Hello.

I was working with rman yesterday, and observed a couple of 
quirks.

Your indicated website home for rman exists, but really isn't very 
helpful.  Looking around a bit, it would seem that Tom Phelps is 
still at UCBerkeley, but isn't maintaining rman, but may return to 
maintaining PDF Tools.  It seems the Multivalent is still being 
actively maintained.

In any event, in my use yesterday, I "harvested" man pages from my 
system to place in a hyperlinked PDF via use of pdflatex and a 
perl script I wrote to do this.  The resulting book was 1200 pages 
long, with 820 pages due to all of the functions that busybox 
fulfills.

LaTeX really doesn't like how rman deals with underscrores 
(signals subscripts in math mode), and just "escaping" the 
underscore doesn't work all the time.  What does seem to work, is 
to replace the escaped underscore with something else.  Lots of 
typefaces lack underscore, and the only really good solution is to 
get into a typewriter font.  Hence, the little bit of perl I used 
was:

  $line =~ s/\\_/{\tt \textunderscore}/g;

While I am not sure that it caused a problem for pdflatex, it 
certainly confused LaTeX mode in emacs, but once rman placed
a
  \begin{verbatim}
in the middle of a sentence (not at the beginning).

As in the process of writing this "book", I was including 
something like 200 chapters, the main document had a preamble, a
 \begin{document}, a bunch of includes and other miscellaneous 
stuff, and a \end{document} (followed by a return) at the end of 
the file.  Pdflatex kept complaining that there was no 
\end{document}.  Fine, my perl script puts in two of them now, and 
things seem to work.  I have no idea why it doesn't read a single 
one properly.  There are no \begin{document} statements in any of 
the rman produced pages (which were edited by the perl script) 
which are included.

Gord


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