[Cin] Creating AppImage

[Georgy Salnikov]

On Sat, 26 Feb 2022, mat wrote:

> In the Mint versions, diffpdf (when comparing words) highlights e.g. on
> chapter 1.3.4, table 1.1, page 15, for much of the table the "yes" and
> "auto" words, even though I cannot see a difference between them. The
> source .tex file are all the same. Also, on that table, on Mint 19.3
> the entry for x264 is on the next page, on Mint 20.3 it is at the same
> page, last entry in the table there. So the layout is not exactly the
> same, even though differences are very small (sometime a line is on a
> different page). The two version have the same number of pages, though.

OK Mat, TeX should produce identically typeset output from the same source
on different platforms provided that the environment of TeX itself (style
files, hyphenation tables, font metrics etc) is also the same. Only then the
nature of the underlying operating system does not matter.

Let's imagine, you have on a newer OS distribution also a newer distribution
of Texlive, and let's imagine, there is also a newer version of hyphen.tex
so that some word on some page is hyphenated differently. This could lead to
one more (or one less) line in the paragraph, then to one line more on the
text page. Then there may come a consequence that some floating table or
figure will walk on another page, the next chapter or section will be
started from other page, etc, and finally the complete document will have a
different number of pages than it had under the older version of Texlive.

But here I expect the most probable reason: a changed font. I never examined
which font sets are requested in the CGG manual. May be, simply some default
fonts. Currently, it is a common practice to use some TTF fonts, either from
the Texlive distribution, or even some system fonts. These fonts, in
contrast with that created by Knuth in the past millenium, may be changing
between versions. For example, recently I upgraded Linux on some computer
and realized that the font 'Liberation Mono' was changed in such a way that
the interline distance became quite different.

> I am not the same opinion of Georgy regarding that is does not matter
> where the manual comes from when joining it with CinGG. For the
> functionality it does not matter, but I believe that one should be able
> to build all parts of the whole shipped product (AppImage with online
> help), and that incldues the manual.

Right, for the pure functionality it does not matter at all. Newertheless,
there is reason to try translating the stuff under different platforms / TeX
versions and compare the results because sometimes this can expose some
bugs/weaknesses. But perhaps one should not require 100% identical
typesetting between different versions of Texlive, this would be hardly
possible. And second, one has to ensure that the version numbers of the
software (mainly latex2html) are not lower than the minimal supported ones.

Georgy
_______________________________________________________________________________

Georgy Salnikov
NMR Group
Novosibirsk Institute of Organic Chemistry
Lavrentjeva, 9, 630090 Novosibirsk, Russia
Phone   +7-383-3307864
Email   sge at nmr.nioch.nsc.ru
_______________________________________________________________________________