Publish ECMA-335 in Markdown

[reflectronic]

The ECMA-335 specification is currently only available in PDF format. Other specifications from Microsoft, like the C# language specification, are available in Markdown format. Is there a plan to publish a plaintext version of ECMA-335, in a format like Markdown?

[AaronRobinsonMSFT]

@reflectronic Just tried to convert ECMA-335 using https://pdf2md.morethan.io/. Was a bit of a mess. Updating that document to markdown is probably a long thankless task. I don't believe we have any such plans. Unsure if we would want to put that in this repo though. Perhaps in https://github.com/dotnet/designs?

[reflectronic]

Well, whichever repo it goes in is ultimately not that important. There is already ECMA-335 related stuff in this repo though, and plenty of other design documents.

probably a long thankless task

Well, since I'm stuck at home, I've got time 😄 At least it will fix the unsightly use of Comic Sans

[jkotas]

Note that ECMA-335 has copyright license that has to be respected for anything derived from it.

[stakx]

FYI, as it happens, I have just recently begun a manual conversion of ECMA-335 to Markdown. It's mostly complete: https://github.com/stakx/ecma-335.

I'd be happy to contribute this to a more official repo if there is interest for it.

(I've also been considering using that Markdown version as a starting point for a Docbook version, which would be more suitable for preparing the standard in a variety of output formats.)

@jkotas, agreed about heeding the copyright. As I understand the ECMA-335 copyright notice, it explicitly allows conversions to different languages and formats, so this shouldn't be a roadblock in principle.

With regard to my Markdown version, I should mention that I did opt to fix some typos and make formatting more consistent in a very few places—those divergences from the original document could possibly be seen as copyright infringements, and may have to be reverted.

[dotnet-policy-service]

Due to lack of recent activity, this issue has been marked as a candidate for backlog cleanup. It will be closed if no further activity occurs within 14 more days. Any new comment (by anyone, not necessarily the author) will undo this process.

This process is part of our issue cleanup automation.

[dotnet-policy-service]

This issue will now be closed since it had been marked no-recent-activity but received no further activity in the past 14 days. It is still possible to reopen or comment on the issue, but please note that the issue will be locked if it remains inactive for another 30 days.