Note that the following should not be taken as a plea for Fvwm to switch to TexInfo, I merely wanted to address some of the points Thomas made.
Also note that I so far have no experience writing manpages nor TexInfo documents, so the above is purely a "client side" view on things. Thomas Adam <tho...@fvwm.org> writes: > On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 02:01:16PM -0500, Javier Fernandez wrote: >> On Sat, Aug 23, 2014 at 05:09:21PM -0600, Glenn Golden wrote: >> > troff. Ancient perhaps, but even today, nothing beats it, IMO. >> > (The TeX/latex >> > family seems to be the only serious competitor, and colleagues >> > over the years >> > familiar with with both seem to like them about equally.) >> >> What do you think of GNU/texinfo? >> >> PS: Don't misinterpret me. I think troff is ok. I see no need to >> move away from troff. I am just curious on your opinions on the >> improvements texinfo might give. > > I personally dislike it, especially since the front-end viewers for info > pages are incredibly unintuitive. > This proof of concept HTML5 GNU Info viewer from Nic Ferrier might be of some interest to some of the people on this list: http://gnudoc.ferrier.me.uk/ Sources are at https://github.com/nicferrier/gnudoc-js > I'm unclear how widespread texinfo is > outside of the GNU world, but it seems still to be something of a curio; > and that manpages have more or less surpassed info pages. I have always considered them to simply have a different focus: when documenting truly large bodies of work I feel info pages are superior due to being easier searchable, allowing for the interlinking of relevant topics (and following those links from within the info viewer) and the ability to jump directly to a relevant subject from the command line (eg. `info gcc C Integers`). In short: superior navigation. As for being unintuitive, that does not surprise me very much, the extra capabilities info provides come at the cost of extra complexity in the viewer, not to mention TexInfo was originally written by RMS and as such uses Emacs style keybindings, something vi(m) users might not be able to appreciate ;-) As for non-GNU projects that use TexInfo, the first one coming to mind would be zsh, whos manpage is rather unwieldy even when split up into different parts. Kind regards, Bert
