David Herring writes: > > > Good morning, > > Let me first start by praising the MySQL documentation. It is > excellent - both in content and in it's indexed, linked, and > searchable layout. > > On that later point, I would like to know how you acheived this ? > What tool(s) was used to create the texinfo document, and which > utilities are used to parse this for web contect, etc. Hi, Sorry for the late response. The primary format of the manual is Texinfo. Most of us write the texinfo in XEmacs with the aid of the 'Texinfo' xemacs mode (of course some less fortunate developers use the lowly 'vi' ;-). You can find out more about Texinfo here: http://www.gnu.org/directory/texinfo.html So we have the manual in this format, and then when we publish the MySQL.com website, we convert the manual to HTML with a perl script called 'texi2html'. You can find this script in our Source Tarball: mysql-3.23.41/Docs/Support/texi2html But to get the searchable manual that you know and love, there are a few more steps. We use a couple of in-house programs written by Sasha Pachev ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), that take this converted 'manual.html', and rip it apart and store it into a MySQL database. The manual is stored in the database according to texinfo node sections. Once the manual is in the database, we can pretty much reconstitute it into any organization that we want. For instance, this page: http://www.mysql.com/doc/ Never use to be such an extensive "Table of Contents", it used to only contain the main chapter headings. But after some reconsideration, we decided that it would be more useful to have a very extensive TOC similiar to this one: http://www.mysql.com/documentation/mysql/bychapter/ Anyways, so we have a second program (the first one is called 'html2mysql', the second 'idxman'), that does this reconstitution that you see at http://www.mysql.com/doc/ . 'idxman' also does all kinds of black magic to hook-up the user comments with the appropriate manual section. I'm sure if you contact Mr. :) Sasha Pachev ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), he could explain in more detail how both of his programs work. You could probably also prod him into giving you copies, as he's been meaning to release them publicly for some time now. Matt > >On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 09:47:30AM +0100, David Herring wrote: > > > > Good morning, > > > > Does anyone have any details on the how the MySQL searchable > > documentation is produced. Is the content held in MySQL with PHP to > > produce the frontend pages - and is this something that can be > > applied generally for web based doumentation services. > > The source file is in texinfo format, and it has good cross-reference > and keyword stuff in it. I believe they have a custom script that > turns it into what's on their site. > > Check with Matt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or Jeremy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> for > details. I suspect that one (or both) of them will know. > > Jeremy > -- > Jeremy D. Zawodny, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Technical Yahoo - Yahoo Finance > Desk: (408) 349-7878 Fax: (408) 349-5454 Cell: (408) 685-5936 -- For technical support contracts, visit https://order.mysql.com/ __ ___ ___ ____ __ / |/ /_ __/ __/ __ \/ / Mr. Matt Wagner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> / /|_/ / // /\ \/ /_/ / /__ MySQL AB, Herr Direktor /_/ /_/\_, /___/\___\_\___/ Hopkins, Minnesota USA <___/ www.mysql.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- Before posting, please check: http://www.mysql.com/manual.php (the manual) http://lists.mysql.com/ (the list archive) To request this thread, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, e-mail <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Trouble unsubscribing? Try: http://lists.mysql.com/php/unsubscribe.php
