I know we have to have a few people on here who've written technical RFCs
(as opposed to 1 April ones like my RFC 2100)...
Any tips on 1) how to do inline boldface and 2) what to do with ASCIIart
illustrations that are too wide for the page?
I'm using Stefan Santteson's nroffEdit (since I'm presently stuck on Windows),
but it doesn't seem to like .B/.R or \fB / \fP for the former, and on the latter point,
it's simple unclear how I should approach the thing (a four-column time-sequence
diagram of a network transaction, similar to that of the four-point SIP call.
Those days I think the things are done with the help
of xml2rfc, I have used xxe Personal Edition with
the xxe-xml2rfc plugin, so no nroff needed really anymore.
Any tips on 1) how to do inline boldface and 2) what to do with ASCIIart
illustrations that are too wide for the page?
Even though there's more work the first time, your life will be a lot
easier if you write them in xml2rfc, since that's what's going to
be the canonical format in the future.
Specific answers:
1) use <spanx>very important</spanx> which won't do anything in the
current line printer image format*, but will emphasize the text in
HTML and other output.
2) Reformat it so it fits in 72 columns. Really. If you don't,
someone else will have to. In the future you'll be able to use SVG to
do real line art.
R's,
John
* - don't even think about backspacing and overprinting