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[Axiom-developer] Re: date of pamphlet documents


From: William Sit
Subject: [Axiom-developer] Re: date of pamphlet documents
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2006 15:04:29 -0400


Bill Page wrote:
> 
> On August 14, 2006 2:13 AM William Sit wrote:
> >
> > When a pamphlet file is rendered, the date of the pdf file is always
> > \today. That seems to be misleading, as many of the source files have
> > not been updated for ages.
> 
> I think the use of \today in the LaTeX source is inappropriate unless
> for some reason the author really does want the date on which the
> document was compiled displayed in the text. Usually it is better
> to simply hard code a fixed date and manually update that when it
> is appropriate.

I tend to agree, but that puts the burden on whoever revises a file
(which adds one more tiny step to the process). I would prefer if is
done automatically.
The \today seems to be a default when \date is not present in the tex
source.
I now added \date to NewAutodocPamphlet (and some other additional
documentation).

> > Would it be possible to post the date of the last modification of
> > the pamphlet file (taken from the file attribute of the PAMPHLET
> > file, not the tex or pdf file)? Of course, this change of date from
> > \today to file date should not be done to the pamphlet itself, but
> > should be part of the extraction process by weave (or better, by
> > the \usepackage{axiom} using a modified \maketitle macro) so that
> > instead of inserting \today, one inserts the last modification date
> > of the pamphlet file (without touching it) to the tex source before
> > applying latex.
> 
> That is a neat idea, but it is a LaTeX thing that is beyond my skill
> level in LaTeX. If there was such a macro that used the file date,
> then we could use that in our pamphlet files.

No, the latex thing is simply to add a line \date{...} where you can put
pretty much anything there (see [SandBoxNewAutodocPamphlet]).  It can be
done probably  with a unix hack to obtain the date of last modification
(maybe looking at the inode of the file system). However, I am sure
there is a utility to do just that.
Once the date is known, some batch editor can insert the \date line into
the generated latex file (it has to also detect that no \date line is
there), right before \maketitle. Alternately, may be those in the know
can make a \filedate macro. Any takers?

Come to think of it, each pamphlet file should include a revision
history, with dates, much like code. So we should have latex macros
\creationdate, \revisiondates, and \filedate (which may be included in
\revisiondates).

> >
> > BTW, in generating the tex source, perhaps one could also set up
> > to \usepackage{hyperref}, as part of \usepackage{axiom}? or
> > should this be left to the author?
> 
> I think it should be left to the author.

I think pamphlet docs should be more uniform in general appearance. Why
would anyone be against using hyperref?

BTW, there is an error in [SandBoxNewAutodocPamphlet]:

Traceback (most recent call last): File
"/var/zope/Products/ZWiki/plugins/Fit.py", line 29, in ? from fit.Parse
import Parse ImportError: No module named fit.Parse

The file does display correctly as far as I can tell.

I think I will remove NewAutodocPamphlet from the Zwiki site (so I don't
have to maintain two versions, the zwiki version is already out of date
:-). I'll leave a pointer there to SandBox. What do you think?

William




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