next up previous contents
Next: Implementing Dynamic Cross Referencing Up: Wednesday August 18, 1999 Previous: Managing Large Projects with

  
Database Publishing with JAVA and TEX


ARTHUR OGAWA
TEX Consultants, California
ogawa@teleport.com



Abstract:  Sun Computer intends its JAVA programming language to be the lingua franca of the World Wide Web. Sun may get their wish: dozens of books about JAVA are published every year, and there is even a conference about JAVA, JavaOne, being held in San Francisco at the same time as this TUG meeting.

If you wanted to publish a book documenting and cross-referencing all the JAVA class libraries (running to 1,000 pages and covering over 1,500 classes, organized into about 70 ``packages'') what would you do? If you are Patrick Chan and Rosanna Lee, you would use JAVA itself to manage the data (about 40Mb of it) and you would use TEX to format your pages.

In my talk, I will describe the criteria for selecting the formatter (i.e., TEX plus macros) for a database typesetting project, the best way of interfacing between TEX and a database engine, and some interesting (perhaps even challenging) features of the formatting work. I will also show how the success of the project enabled the author to make last-minute revisions to the book (changes necessitated by late developments in the JAVA class libraries themselves) even though this involved the reprocessing of all 40Mb of data, in less than 24 hours.


next up previous contents
Next: Implementing Dynamic Cross Referencing Up: Wednesday August 18, 1999 Previous: Managing Large Projects with
Page last modified on 1999-08-04