On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 17:01, Frank Heckenbach wrote:
Richard D. Jackson wrote:
That's precisely the goal of texinfo. It is not a universal formatter (unless you use explicit conditionals for the different output formats), but within its scope, it provides for equivalent documentation in the various formats from a single source (which IMHO is absolutely essential for GPC, given the amount of stuff to be documented, and the lack of human resources to even maintain several overlapping documentations) ...
I really need to make the time to read the texinfo manual :)
It might look quite complex initially (there are many things that are rarely used). Sometimes it's easier to just look at some existing documentation ...
If the explicit conditionals you mentioned above will let me do what I want for the HTML output then I just may end up with one output format.
Yes, they look like this (from GPC's documentation):
@ifhtml @html
<table align=right><tr><td> <a href="../images/GnuPascal.png"> <img alt="[Gnu and Blaise Pascal]" src="../images/GnuPascal-small.png" width=123 height=99><br> (PNG, 10 KB) </a> </td></tr></table> @end html @end ifhtml
`@ifhtml' is the conditional (there are `@if[not]{html,info,plaintext,tex}'), and `@html' allows for verbatim HTML code.
Great that will get what I need/want. But that is on the back burner as I want to get texinfo working first.
With a switch to pretty up the HTML if you want it.
If you mean me, I'm not sure if I want it. I think I'd have too see a concrete example and what the "pretty up" would do, but I guess we'll find out in time ...
When I get to it there I will make up some samples.
Your draft is significaly simpler than pasdoc but then again pasdoc spends most of its time figuring things out from the code so that the code becomes a source for the documentation. Which is the right way to do it as it makes writing the documentation easer on the programmer.
Yes, I expect this to be the difficult part. The output should be the considerably easier bit.
True that is the reason I'm going to work on pasdoc as all of the hard stuff is done. I just need to figure out how it does it so I can maintain it and modify it for our use.
My biggest dislike of texinfo has mostly been with the online viewers ( aka info ) versas with texinfo itself.
You mean the "default" info reader? I don't like is as well (I find it harder to use than vi, and I'm not a fan of vi ;-). But that's not the only one that exists. RHIDE as well as my editor PENG contain their own info readers and I think emacs also does, and probably more programs. But if you prefer HTML or PDF, just use that. :-)
I will have to look into RHIDE and PENG.
Richard