Bill Clementson's Blog

LispM Manuals Online

Monday, August 28, 2006

Recently, Hans Hübner has made available an online, Hypertext version of the Lisp Machine Manual. Although there have been PDF versions of the manual available in the past, this version is much more convenient to read online. Hans comments on the conversion:

"This is the hypertext edition of the Lisp Machine Manual. It describes the Lisp Machine system software, which had been developed between 1978 and 1984 at the MIT.

This version of the manual is the result of automatically converting the source files of the printed 6th edition of the original manual, edited by Richard Stallman. The intention of the conversion is to bring the manual into a more modern format that could be read and edited using contemporary tools. The goal is to make the Lisp Machine documentation widely available and editable.

Originally, the manual was authored as text files with markup for the 'Bolio' text processor, which ran on the PDP-10 systems and Lisp machines at the MIT in the 1980s. Neither the source nor the documentation for Bolio were available at the time the conversion was done. As such the meaning of the markup had to be deduced from the context and there may be errors or deficiencies in the hypertext edition that are a result of the conversion process.

The conversion was done with slightly edited Bolio source files. The edits were done to correct problems introduced while converting the tape backups back to text files and slight structural changes to ease the conversion. Additionally, the chapter on Resources has not been an own chapter in the printed 6th edition, but rather a section in the "Manipulating List Structure" chapter. This presumably happened by accident. The source was changed that so that "Resources" is now in it's own chapter.

The hypertext edition of the manual consists of files in an XML format that resembles the original document stucture. It does not use a well-known XML schema or DTD. XSL templates are provided to convert the XML format to HTML for online browsing. Conversion to other documentation formats like DocBook or Texinfo are possible, but the intention is to support these format in an output-only matter."

"I have started converting the Genera (Symbolics Lisp Machine OS) documentation into PDF format. It's available here. Conversion is done using an Open Genera printing to a UNIX printer server, which then uses Ghostscript to convert the Postscript to PDF. Genera uses bitmap fonts for printing, this looks ugly in places and breaks search and cut&paste. Also, the page numbers are random and misleading."