From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Gavin Smith Subject: Any interest in using HTML for locally-installed Texinfo documentation? Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2019 13:55:55 +0100 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Return-path: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: bug-texinfo-bounces+gnu-bug-texinfo2=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: "bug-texinfo" To: guix-devel@gnu.org Cc: Texinfo List-Id: guix-devel.gnu.org 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. Best wishes, Gavin