Re: [bug-gettext] ELPA and gettext.el

[Alexandre Garreau <galex-713@galex-713.eu>]

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On 2019-01-20 at 11:58, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Can ELPA packages also provide HTML-format documentation (generated from
> texinfo sources) in a canonical way? HTML rendering is decent, 'info' rendering
> in Emacs is inferior (use of fixed-width font for plain text, use of _xxx_
> for @emph instead of slanted/italic face, etc.). Therefore I would want
> to provide the documentation in HTML at least.

A more mixed opinion about texinfo HTML output ergonomics:

As you note HTML output is here typographically superior… though, emacs
is perfectly able to use a variable-width font and italic face, probably
quite easily, but won’t (currently), afaik, be able to justify text.

Now note texinfo HTML output paragraphs are by default not justified,
and allow by default the display of way too large visual lines (longer
than the emacs 72 chars, and a looooot more than the famous “optimal”
66-character limit), and, thought that’d be only a question of generic
CSS, currently HTML output is pretty old, and absolutely not semantical
at all.  So with current HTML output you’d have to make a
custom-info-output-like plugin or browser to, from currenty,
unsemantical, HTML output, get as much semantics as the emacs info
format, which allow way better interaction and search.

A more semantical pure strict XHTML(2.0?) or HTML5 output would allow
such interaction by a decent browser (which currently doesn’t exist in
nature imho).

Now about ELPA doc: I often saw markdown (or alike, such as org-mode)
one-page documentations, which, on several package searching utilities,
automatically convert to HTML, with the typographical features you
mentioned.

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