Re: GNUstep Help Format

[Nicola Pero]

> So, I've heard tell of TODO files scattered about mentioning a
> "GNUstep help format" to be planned some time in the future.
> 
> It seems that a lot of the core packages have their documentation in
> Texinfo format, which I think is pretty great. Would it be reasonable
> to suppose that, when a future "GNUstep help format" comes about,
> Texinfo documentation will be upward compatible? In other words, there
> will be some kind of texi2gshelp tool?
> 
> The reason I'm asking is that I maintain 5 GNUstep applications for
> Debian GNU/Linux, most of which are poorly documented or
> undocumented. I'd like to start creating some skeletal documentation
> (and feed it upstream, of course), but I'd rather not do the work if
> the docs will be incompatible in the future.
> 
> Any suggestions?

The natural help format would probably be RTF at the moment, since it's
the only format for which we have a parser/creator in the gui.  If you
choose a format which can output RTF, you can probably already display it
in the applications!

But maybe html would be the natural help format ... hopefully we'll have a
good html parser at some point :-)

It's also quite possible that another, gnustep-specific, format becomes
the standard one.  I don't think you should bother too much with this
option right now, and unless the other format will have so many advantages
over html and so much support and intelligence behind it to be terribly
convincing, I would say we'd prefer html by far.

As soon as it can be converted to html (and maybe also postscript for
printing, and maybe also rtf for viewing now), I'd suggest any reasonably
standard format you are confident with should be ok (that should include
widespread TeX subsets/macro dialects like texinfo or latex; you might
consider gsdoc, or maybe even html itself).

If you're looking for something which can be viewed from the application
now, if the format can also be converted into rtf, it might actually work
now!