[GRASS-dev] Manpage HTML markup consistency

[Dylan Beaudette]

On Wednesday 27 February 2008, Glynn Clements wrote:
> Dylan Beaudette wrote:
> > I personally prefer LaTeX for documentation writing, but this may
> > introduce too much overhead for users interested only in HTML documents.
> > There are well-established tools to accomplish this, but not all users
> > will have a TeX install. I noticed a tool called Latex2Man [1] which
> > could simplify man page generation from a 'core' documentation set
> > written in LaTeX.
>
> TeX has much the same problem as HTML: if you need to generate any
> kind of restricted format, you have to restrict usage to a subset
> which can be accurately converted to all supported target formats.
>
> E.g. complex equations may come out fine if you generate PostScript or
> DVI output, but may be completely unintelligible when converted to
> nroff and displayed on a terminal.

Good point. 

It seems like some variant of well-defined XML would be the most flexible in 
terms of storing the documentation. User-friendly HTML/Man pages would then 
be generated from the XML.

I like the idea, but given the amount of resistance-- I am not sure that it 
would be well received and therefore not implemented.

Dylan

-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soil Resource Laboratory
http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341