Re: .tex .pdf backend for autogsdoc worth the trouble?

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Sunday, December 23, 2001, at 09:16 PM, Willem Rein Oudshoorn wrote:

> Thanks for the explanation.
> I just looked through the code, and it seems easy but rather
> tedious.  This sparked my curiosity, what is the motiviation
> for writing autogsdoc instead of using AutoDoc?
> Writing backends for AutoDoc is a lot easier than writing
> backends for autogsdoc (at least that is my impression).

Well, autogsdoc is a work in progess ... alpha-test if you like.

One important thing is that it produces XML documentation as the
intermediate stage, so any XML processing toolset can be used as
a backend.  You could use an XSL processor and just write different
stylesheets to produce different output.  In my last email I talked
about separate output bundles within autogsdoc, but I'm more than
half convinced it would be nicer better to have separate tools for
each stage of the process.

Achieving this clean separation was one of the objectives that
immediately formed in my mind having investigated autodoc.

Another was to drastically improve the amount of information
extracted from the source code (cross referencing in particular).

I'm not sure which would be easier - the gsdoc stuff is richer/more
powerful and consequently there is more work to be done, on the
other hand, there are plenty of tools available to help you do it
so gsdoc could be easier (I guess that depends on how familiar you
are with the xml world).