Have a readable version of the form text available regardless of builds, artifacts, systems

[seanenck]

I think this may be the original intent of #1 by @marctjones (though I'm not necessarily speaking on behalf of anyone but myself) but that issue (#1) how now become a technical discussion which in the noise has lost an important point which is:

There should be a way to view the form text without a hard requirement on Adobe, Windows, DoD Certs, etc. Whether that is via an extraction from a PDF, building from plain text/latex/etc. and producing a PDF and markdown, or something else - being able to see what the agreement and text is without immediately being restricted down a tool chain (as mentioned above) would be ideal.

Since #1 has become a very technical thing at this point, I would say if possible we should leave this one open unless #1 is fixes and resolves it somehow (e.g. tex, markdown, etc.). This is probably a duplicate of #1 given all things but for clarity sake doing something that isn't the traffic on #1 would help - if we can keep this ticket without technical dumpings of the file and dev notes we're probably better off.

[ckaran]

Sure, I'll leave it open until we have a solution in #1.

[fulldecent]

Work on this issue is at

https://github.com/USArmyResearchLab/ARL-Open-Source-Guidance-and-Instructions/blob/form266/ARL%20Form%20-%20266.md

[ckaran]

@fulldecent do you know how hard it is to generate MarkDown files from LaTeX? I'd like to put together a simple build script that generates the various formats from the LaTeX directly to ensure that we don't accidentally have different files with different wording.

[seanenck]

@ckaran - the Makefile in form266 branch supports this from the merged PR but for further reference

md: clean
	pandoc $(IN) -o $(BUILD)/form.md

[ckaran]

@enckse my apologies, I didn't see it. Unfortunately, I've managed to slightly hose my machine, so I can't test it at the moment. I'll put together a virtual machine to test it out at some point.

[seanenck]

Understandable, I think the "real issue" is actually #27 in which I just need to know how/where we should communicate these things :)

[fulldecent]

@ckaran The pandoc command from @enckse is exactly what I use, or something like

pandoc -f latex IN -t md -o out.md

[ckaran]

@fulldecent I understand, and I didn't mean to imply that I didn't think it worked, I just wanted to test it and watch the output myself. That way I can help work on the form too; at the moment I'm kind of hamstrung.