Re: Texinfo reputation

[Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com>]

On 02/12/2024 19:47, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Max Nikulin Mon, 2 Dec 2024 10:00:56 +0700
>>
>> Those who read .info documents may recommend e.g. pinfo. From my point
>> of view, tkinfo is usually better than "info".
> 
> Are they being developed?  ISTR that someone said they were no longer
> updated.

I have not tried to report bugs for tkinfo (it hangs sometimes on search 
attempts, but I am unaware of really serious issues). It has some 
advantages and disadvantages in comparison to other means of reading 
texinfo documents. It is not perfect, but in some sense it is feature 
complete. I am grateful to its developers and maintainers. It is 
available in Debian:
<https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/tkinfo>

I was not inspired by pinfo description, so I have not tried it. It has 
some issue with maintenance and it has been kicked out of Debian 
testing. It is still available in current stable (bookworm):
<https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/pinfo>

In my opinion, it means that texinfo docs in general and .info format in 
particular are becoming less useful outside of Emacs. Formatting of PDF 
is too rigid. HTML files are either excessively huge or uncomfortably 
granular with enough nodes containing just a handful lines of text. 
Moreover, there is a fraction of users who prefers locally installed 
documents.

A container format like EPUB might be an option for distributing 
formatted documents, but the issue is decent free viewers for various 
platforms. It seems they must be based on almost full fledged web 
browser engines.