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

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi Gavin,

Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com> skribis:

> On Sat, Oct 19, 2019 at 9:31 PM Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> wrote:
>> > I started another line of development, using the WebKitGTK engine.
>> > http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/texinfo.git/log/?h=webkitgtk-info
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> > I may be able to get an initial prototype that other people could try
>> > ready in a few days. As ever, if anyone is interested in helping
>> > with/taking over this project, please let me know.
>>
>> Thanks for the update, it looks promising.  Let us know when you’d like
>> people to give it a try!
>
> The work is available on the webkitgit-info branch of the texinfo git
> repository. I think it is developed to a point where it shows that a
> browser for locally installed HTML documentation is clearly possible
> with WebKitGTK. There are some notes in the README file on how to
> build manuals for use with the browser.

[...]

> https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/video/demo.webm.

This looks very nice already!  It seems to me that the core features one
would want are there: use of local copies of the manual, index search,
browsing commands, etc.

Does the reader fall back to an on-line copy of manuals that are
unavailable locally?  That would be nice, though it should probably
first ask for user consent.

I’d love to see an appropriate CSS applied by default to all the locally
installed manual.  Perhaps the WebKitGTK code could “force” a CSS to
each HTML page?

In the future, it’d be great to have syntax highlighting like we have at
<https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Using-the-Configuration-System.html>,
but… I guess that’s another story.  :-)

What would be the next steps for you?  Do you plan to have this new
reader released as part of the next Texinfo release, or as a separate
package?

Thanks,
Ludo’.