Re: Use of LaTeX for the specification

[Matias Ezequiel Vara Larsen <mvaralar@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 03:41:18PM +0100, Alex Bennée wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I recently updated my distro to Trixie and found that HTML generation is
> broken. As far as I can tell this comes down to the use of \cline as
> shown in this minimal example:
> 
>   \documentclass{article}
>   \usepackage{hhline}
>   \begin{document}
>   \begin{tabular}{ |l||l|l| }
>   \hline
>   Bits & Device Specific & Purpose \\
>   \cline{1-2}
>   Read / Write & Device Specific & \\
>   \cline{1-2}
>   Purpose & Device Specific & \\
>   \hline
>   \end{tabular}
>   \end{document}
> 
> which results in TeX ending early:
> 
>   ! Undefined control sequence.
>   \f:HBorder ...border-top:1px solid \#\hline:color 
>                                                     ;"></td>
>   l.8 R
>        ead / Write & Device Specific & \\
>   ? 
>   ! Emergency stop.
> 
> I'm liaising with Debian and the TexLive authors to try and figure out
> whats going on. However it does raise a bigger question for the
> specification - why do we use LaTeX?
> 
> I don't doubt that is a powerful typesetting system but its arcane
> syntax is a bit of a barrier to entry especially for casual
> contributors. With the recent breakage I wonder if I'm the canary in the
> coal mine and this will potentially be a problem for everyone else once
> their TeX setups upgrade.
> 
> I'd like to augment the repo with some GitHub actions so we can keep an
> upto date rendered draft available as well as some lint checks so we can

I think that is a great idea. I wonder if we can do it in the current
Github repo. Do you mean to automatically generate `.pdf` from HEAD for
example?

Matias