Subject: LDP, FSF, Texinfo
From: [email-masked] (Gavin Thomas Nicol)
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 7 Feb 1994 02:24:00 +0200

>[email-masked] (C. S. Hendrix) writes:
>> I'm not asking you to. I just want to be open-minded about the
>> possibilities. Using texinfo just might give us many advantages
>> which outweigh the initial trouble of using it.
>
>What advantages are those?  I used Texinfo for a long time before
>finally getting tired of the hassle.  LaTeX is easier, more powerful,

Well, the advantages *were* the online browsing system, which is
somewhat better than man pages. With XMosaic, those advantages have
been lost to a degree. I guess the ideas of ITS have finally become
obsolete :-)

>But at least UNIX works good.  Texinfo is not an idea manual system.
>It's just widely used because there is no alternative.

There are alternatives *now*. When LDP started, there were none.

>To explain what I mean about Linux stuff being better than GNU:  I find
>that the LDP manuals are FAR better than most GNU stuff, especially for
>beginners.  Everyone did a real good job on the LDP stuff.  GNU manuals
>usually are a terrible read and appear almost deliberately hard to
>understand.  Of course, if this will help GNU learn to write better...

I hope you are not referring to my Flex manual for the FSF :-)

I seems to me there are 2 issues going on at the moment; Working with
the FSF, and file format.

As some as the oldies on this channel might remember, I tried, when
the LDP first started, to get them to work woth the FSF, to no avail.
I still think this is a good idea; one which can benefit both
communities, so Matt's idea of generalising wherever possible is a
good one. I agree that a lot of the FSF documentation needs work, so
this is a good opportunity to help both camps. Fix the FSF stuff, and
distribute it along with the LDP written stuff.

For file format, I must admit that I was a great fan of Texinfo some
time ago. At that time, it *was* better than most things that were
then available. I've come to change my mind though.

LaTeX, while producing nice documents, is not all that easy to extend
to online browsing. I admit that this is *not* a major focus of the
LDP, and in fact, I generally prefer printed pages to online browsing
(call me old fashioned). Texinfo provides limited hypertext features,
and an online browser. It must be admitted that Texinfo output is far
from the quality of LaTeX. Now we also have HTML, which is based on
SGML, that provides the best of both worlds, in addition to having
many translators available for it. HTML is limited in it's formatting
capabilities though (no tables for example), and HTML+ addresses some
of these problems, but is not widely accepted (yet). Perhaps the
largest weakness on HTML+ is that there is no way to directly express
figures in it (ie. it has no picture environment).

Rather than going for either LaTeX, or Texinfo, I would suggest using
HTML+, with some extensions for figures. This can be easily translated
into LaTeX (and vice versa), and Texinfo documents from the FSF can be
easily converted into it. There are X11 and TTY based browsers for it,
and it supports fine-grained hypertext links. It is also rapidly
becoming an Internet standard.

Long ago (3 years is a long time :-)), I offered to write a LaTeX to
texinfo converter, and a man-page to Texinfo converter, because I felt
documentation should be in Texinfo. I have written both programs
(though the man page one is far from perfect), but feel that Texinfo
is not what should be used. I would vote for HTML+, with extensions
for directly defining figures, and I offer to write the necessary
converters. I should note that an HTML to LaTeX converter already
exists, so an HTML+ to LaTeX converter would be trivial.

I must say that I am amazed that the ideas I had 3 years ago are only
*now* becoming seriously considered...

nick