Hi, I hope all is well with you-all. Some time ago I cooked up a category system for Maxima. That was a success in the sense that it works as intended. You can see a random example: https://maxima.sourceforge.io/docs/manual/maxima_33.html Just scroll down a bit and look for "Categories: ...". Categories are the same as the tags that get stuck on, e.g., bug reports or Stackoverflow posts, etc. etc.
The bad news is that it's implemented as a terrible conglomeration of bash scripting and regex matching. I am thinking about ways to make it less terrible. First of all, am I reinventing a wheel here? Is there already an implementation of a category system for Texinfo? There wasn't when I got started but that was a long time (more than 10 years) ago. I searched again today but didn't find anything. Assuming there isn't such a system already, I am thinking a cleaner way to implement it would be to generate an intermediate representation of Texinfo documents, do some transformations on it, and then generate the output (info, html, pdf). Is it possible to use XML as an intermediate representation? I know that one can generate XML via --xml -- the crucial step would be to be able to input XML as well. Is it possible for makeinfo to read XML as input? Failing that, is there any other structured intermediate representation (i.e., can be either output or input) of Texinfo documents? Thanks for any information, I appreciate your help. Robert Dodier
