Re: Any interest in using HTML for locally-installed Texinfo documentation?

[sirgazil <sirgazil@zoho.com>]

Hello, Gavin :)

El 1/04/19 a las 7:55 a. m., Gavin Smith escribió:
> Dear Guix developers,
> 
> I hope I am not intruding by advertising a project that may be of
> interest to you.
> 
> Documentation for GNU packages and others is often installed in the
> Info format, a plain text format.  Using a plaintext based format for
> documentation does not take advantage of bitmapped displays that have
> been available for decades.  It does not allow styling of text or
> reflowing of text.  Much information is lost in the conversion from
> Texinfo to Info and any attempt in, for example, Emacs to re-add this
> information is unreliable.
> 
> Nonetheless, Info viewers have continued to have advantages over web
> browsers.  They are fast, and have features for searching the manual
> with index lookup.  They allow the use of keyboard commands.
> 
> In attempt to bring some of the benefits of the Info viewers to HTML
> documentation in web browsers, in 2017, as part of Google Summer of
> Code, Matthieu Lirzin worked on a JavaScript interface that works with
> the HTML that texi2any produces.  His work is substantially complete.
> A manual with this interface added is at
> https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo-html/Overview.html.
> All the important keyboard commands that work in the Info viewers are
> implemented, including index lookup.
> 
> The code he produced is in the js/ subdirectory of the Texinfo git
> repository, and also available at
> https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-js-0.0.90.tar.gz
> 
> I believe this work has great potential to increase the ease of
> accessing documentation, including documentation locally installed on
> a user's own computer.  When a user is using a bitmapped display (e.g.
> with X11), this could become the default way that they access
> documentation.
> 
> I am contacting you because the distribution level may be the best
> place to push this forward.  There are two reasons:
> * The distribution could take care of installation of HTML
> documentation files (at the moment, there is no standard place to
> install these, and Automake does not support installing HTML files
> generated from Texinfo).
> * It could also take responsibility for checking web browser
> compatibility.  Even if we don't use the JavaScript interface for
> documentation on the GNU website due to browser compatibility
> concerns, an OS distribution would have control over which browser was
> used to view documentation.
> 
> Although I have little knowledge of Guix, it is the natural choice of
> operating system distribution to contact about this possibility, as
> both Texinfo and Guix are GNU projects.
> 
> If there is nobody who wants to take this forward within Guix, then
> suggestions would also be welcome on how to otherwise push this
> forward.


I didn't know this project existed, I wanted something like this.

As a high-level user of computers, I'd like to see this kind of 
documentation available both in the desktop and on the Web. I support it.

Thanks for the information,


-- 
Luis Felipe López Acevedo
http://sirgazil.bitbucket.io/