A New PDF Version of "The MDL Programming Language"

This project aims to produce a PDF version of "The MDL Programming Language" by S. W. Galley and Greg Pfister. As source it uses the markdown files, which the participants in the https://github.com/taradinoc/mdl-docs project transcribed from scans of the original MIT document https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a070930.pdf (referenced here http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/ADA070930).

Quite a few typos and typographical errors of the transcription was corrected and the name index readded.

The original README.md was renamed to README-orig.md.

The original creation of ReadTheDocs version from mkdocs.yml is untested in this project and will most likely fail.

Howto

This project uses Pandoc to create a LaTeX version of the document and uses PDFLaTeX to typeset the final PDF.

The conversion was done on Windows but should be possible on Linux with minor script changes.

Prerequisites

• perl
  • On Windows I use ActivePerl
• pandoc, the universal document converter
  • I use https://pandoc.org/releases.html
• A TeX distribution
  • On Windows I use MiKTeX

Conversion

1. Merge MarkDown Files

   see etc/00-do-merge.cmd

2. Make TeX File with pandoc

   see etc/10-mk-tex.cmd

3. Transform the TeX File

   see etc/20-conv.cmd for the replacements needed. Perl is used to globally replace text fragments. Don't ask, what's going on there. I don't know anymore myself.

4. Create PDF Version with PDFLaTeX

   see etc/30-mk-pdf.cmd

5. Make all in one step

   see etc/99-mk-all.cmd

• The final file is here

  see tex/mdl.pdf