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

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Saturday, December 22, 2001, at 08:30 PM, Willem Rein Oudshoorn wrote:
> Now what is the status of gsdoc?  Is this the basis sequence?
>
>         autogsdoc            handtune         gsdoc
> source -----------> .gsdoc  ---------> .gsdoc -----> .html

I forgot to say before ... the above scheme was/is actually more
like the plan than the current state of the code suggests.

I wanted to get rid of the current gsdoc tool because it uses
libxml directly and is poorly structured.  On the other hand I
wanted to keep it around for backward compatibility.

So the current scheme is be something like -

        autogsdoc            handtune         autogsdoc
source -----------> .gsdoc  ---------> .gsdoc ---------> .html

Ie. autogsdoc is currently performing both phases of transformation
from source/headers to gsadoc and from gsdoc to xhtml.  In fact, the
handtuning phase would normally be omitted.

Eventually, I'd like to phase out the existing gsdoc tool and replace
it with a new version by taking the code from autogsdoc and putting it
in a separate tool.  This will be really (it helps to have had something
in mind right from the beginning) easy ...

The two operations are completely separate in autogsdoc right now -

The first part of the tool produces gsdoc output, neatly formatted so
that the xml code is easily readable and editable by hand.

The second part of the tool produces xhtml from gsdoc source, and you
can even feed gsdoc files into autogsdoc as input.