"Robert J. Chassell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Ideally, people would write all their documentation in Texinfo, which
> has always been the prime GNU documentation format. But many people,
> including the LDP, use DocBook. I don't want to see useless conflict
> over these two quite good formats.
Personally, I like info and makeinfo, (except for the broken handling
of latin-1 characters, I haven't yet been able to get them right in
both info and TeX). But I don't consider its input format, texinfo, to
be really good. I haven't looked at DocBook, but I think I would like
a makeinfo program that accepts an alternative input format.
> In any event, at the moment, free documentation is distributed in
> several different formats, plain text, man pages, HTML, DocBook, and
> Texinfo. Of those formats, DocBook and Texinfo are the best.
The important part is to be able to have a *single* source file and
generate all major formats. If different people use different source
formats, that's no big problem. Tools for conversion between different
source formats could be useful, but not terribly important.
The output formats I care about are info, html, paper, and plain ascii
text. That's *the* feature of texinfo that I need. Can the DocBook
tools give me both info and high quality typesetting on paper?
But this is a minor point, texinfo is good enough that I can live with
it. I don't want to restart the doc format war.
> A nice side effect is that if we get a a Texinfo to DocBook converter,
> we get an indirect Texinfo to man page converter!
I don't want to convert an entire texinfo manual to a man page. I want
to create reasonably short man pages from selected nodes in the input
file, in particular the "Invoking ..."-style nodes.
Regards,
/Niels
