"Karsten M. Self" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > on Fri, Dec 05, 2003 at 11:17:04AM -0500, Bijan Soleymani ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > RTFL. > > It's not just the reader. It's the document structure.
I read the damn thing! Here are your section headings: 1) It attempts to replace, not augment, an existing, established, viable, useful, and effective standard. It displaces man pages. 2) It's (largely) bound to a specific viewer. It requires an info viewer (not true note my comment). 3) It fragments the documentation effort. Bah. Whatever. 4) Info and man serve different functions. True. 5) It splits a programs docs into multiple pages. Again you can convert it to html all on one page. 6) GNU project manpages frequently deprecate manpages Ok is that a problem with the format? or the GNU project? 7) Info viewers have usability problems Again convert to html or pdf. 8) Info as extended documentation Ok so Docbook is better than Texinfo. 9) The learning curve argument Yeah learning to read html or a pdf or a physical book is tough. 10) A good idea...five minutes too late. I kind of agree with this one. 11) KISS Texinfo is almost limited to ascii text. If the little addition of crossreferences makes it non-simple then... 12) Thou shalt render content and presentation asunder. I don't get what this means. 13) Remedy the problem Ok whatever. 14) And yes, manpages have their problems. Example... Ok so man pages aren't perfect. So I missed the whole part where you explained that Texinfo can be converted into info, html, ps or pdf. And that if you don't like one format you can just use another. And in any case it isn't unreasonable to put the basic documentation in a section of the extended documentation. Especially for really complicated programs. I don't know maybe I'm a sucker for this kind of documentation. I also love the perl and python documentation. The perl documentation is in POD (plain old documentation) their own simple little format, which they convert to man and html. But it's not traditional manpages it's more like a huge book with each section as a seperate manpage. I don't know what format the python documentation is in (might be Latex), but they also convert it to html and info. In both cases it is nice to be able to access it from the command line. The problem with some formats is that they just don't convert to something that can be used on a text terminal. Bijan -- Bijan Soleymani <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.crasseux.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
