On Fri, Jan 08, 1999 at 08:55:02AM +0100, Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
>
> Excellent idea! And I like the result.
Yay!
>
> I wish I was so impressive I could impress myself.
Well, if you'd like, you can just be impressed by me instead. That will make
two of us :)
> Amir> Do me a favor and take a look at it. Are there things I need to
> Amir> translate differently, or could we include it just like this in
> Amir> lyxdoc? Are there typos?
>
> Would it be possible to make it have a real title instead of this
> stupid first section? To have some of the text in tt font when
> necessary (even if it is not visible in the Man)? To avoid having
> UPPERCASE section titles.
>
> In short, I'd like to have the best of both worlds: a man page which
> looks like a man page, and a LyX document which looks like a document.
This is a great idea, and at least parts of it ought to be entirely possible.
I definitely have various ideas for upgrading pod2lyx so that the resulting
LyX file is more appropriate to LyX. Make the section names "ufirst" is a good
example. Things we could do:
- as you suggest, make the name of the pod file into the title. Hm. We could
either use the actual name of the pod OR take the "NAME" section. The NAME
section is required for conforming pod, so that should be safe. The only
problem is that the title might be too long. Another option would be to make
the NAME section into an Abstract---or compromise and make the actual program
name into a \title and its description (anything following a - and whitespace)
into an abstract.
- add a table of contents. (Why not? It's essentially free if we use Section
instead of Section*). Admittedly, you don't expect a table of contents in a
man page, but I wish they had one in, say, the csh man page (26 pages)!
- pod L<> references. pod2man turns L<"BUGS"> into "the BUGS section in
elsewhere in this man page. We can do the same BUT we can create labels for
each section, and then ADD A REFERENCE when translating the L<> to make it a
hyperlink!
- pod2latex automatically indexes every section & item. I turned that off but
we could make it an option. (And there's an X<> pod thing to index anyway)
-handle accents. I just realized that pod does, so I added the accent aigu
(sp?) to the e and i in José Abílio. Etienne and David Suarez de Lis (and John
Weiss :) should let me know if they have latin1 accents in their names, too.
Anyway, "man" doesn't support it but lyx does, so we could translate that too.
(pod2latex already does this, so it should be easy)
- other ideas? I'm in excited to be coding mode now, so now's the time for
feature requests :)
> Until a man page class exists, I think you should continue developping
> the pod version. Besides, having a pod2lyx script could appeal to perl
> hackers... in particular if we add pod support into LyX (how difficult
> would that be?).
I would think that José could make linuxdoc/docbook output this pretty easily,
since it's similar to man/html sorts of things and very simple.
I agree that this could be useful to perl hackers, especially if we make the
pod2lyx and lyx2pod translations trivial. Then you could write docs in LyX,
without needing to remember the fancy escape characters, and output pod, which
is the extremely portable perl standard. Or output man/html/text straight from
lyx instead of going through pod. Neat!
-Amir
