Re: writing man pages or texinfo documentation
On Tue, May 25, 1999 at 10:44:01PM +0100, Adam Sampson wrote:
>
> IMHO, neither emacs-info nor the standalone info viewer are sufficiently
> friendly for beginners---even I have difficulty remembering the info
> commands, whereas "man" uses my default pager. Info is
> unattractive---"links" aren't obvious---and texinfo isn't exactly the
> simplest format to write. Most Linux distributions now provide a graphical
> info reader; either tkinfo or some variation on info2www. So:
In addition to the graphical viewers you mentioned there is a
nice console info viewer called pinfo. It follows lynx's UI
of using the arrow keys to traverse links.
http://zeus.polsl.gliwice.pl/~pborys/
It is also a Debian package, atleast in unstable.
> As everybody knows how to use "The Web", why not use SGML as the "standard"
> documentation format? That way, we can convert to HTML for interactive
> info-style viewing using Lynx, Netscape or another browser of choice (or for
> Web publishing, obviously), we can produce a printable version, and we can
> produce a flat-text version that "man" could show using a pager.
>
> Problem solved. Uh, right. I'm sure there's at least one problem I haven't
> forseen...
Well, note that texinfo can be translated to other formats besides
info aswell, including html, dvi, postscript, or plain text.
IMHO what would be nice to have and is perhaps more important to
beginners than the default documentation format is a unified
interface to all the common documentation formats. As there
will always be a diverse mix of documentation.
I also have a preference for lynx's way, and am thinking
about extending pinfo to allow it to load other documentation
formats and apply lynx's UI where applicable. Either using
the dl interface to allow new doc formats to be loaded or
perhaps embedding guile.
-amcl
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