Re: [PATCH 5/6] gnu: mit-scheme: Generate and install documentation.

[Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org>]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 7:50 PM, Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
> Federico Beffa <beffa@ieee.org> skribis:
>> Texinfo is great for looking up pieces of information in a reference
>> manual.
>
> You mean Info, right?

yes.

>
>> However, when it comes to reading a sizable part, I much prefer PDFs
>> with a much superior graphic quality and scaling capability and would
>> like to keep it (my eyes aren't in great conditions). I think we can
>> drop PS. DVI is not installed. HTML is required by
>> 'emacs-mit-scheme-doc'.
>
> One can choose the font family and size for Info documents viewed in
> Emacs (or even in a terminal.)  :-)  I find that Info is much more
> convenient when reading on a computer because of its interface to
> navigate the document, search the indexes, and search for words.

I know that you can choose font and size in emacs and console. But the
fact stays that the rendered quality difference is very large. I do
not know what to add... Many peoples claim not to see much difference.
I and some friends do see a large difference. Obviously the
visual-system varies a lot between peoples.

As said, I agree that for looking up reference information the Info
format is pretty good.

>
> The thing is, we could make an exception for MIT Scheme and provide PDF
> and/or HTML in addition to Info.
>
> However, what should we do with the whole set of GNU packages?  I’m
> very much in favor of keeping only Info by default, possibly with a few
> exceptions.

HTML is not better than Info. Here we only need to keep it for
'emacs-mit-scheme-doc' to work. This is functionality for mit-scheme
whereby Emacs looks up the documentation for the identifier at point.

For PDFs, it depends on the type and quality of the manual. If it is
short and/or poor, then nobody will spend hours reading it. But if the
manual is good and long, then there is a chance that people will spend
a lot of time reading it and it would be nice to have a good quality
environment to read it (again, I'm talking about font graphics
rendering).

This is analogous to making public buildings suitable for people with
wheel-chairs, ... may people don't care, until they are affected :-(

Regards,
Fede