Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[David Kastrup]

Rüdiger Sonderfeld <address@hidden> writes:

> On Friday 05 December 2014 07:35:49 Eric S. Raymond wrote:
>> The positioning problem is that info/Texinfo makes us look like a
>> steam-powered archaic joke to younger developers.  Text-only
>> presentation with obtrusive links and a complex command set for a
>> viewer that's *not a web browser*?  In 2014?  Really?
>
> texinfo does support images and in fact the info viewer in GNU Emacs supports 
> those images.  But sadly this doesn't seem to be common knowledge and there 
> are even projects who use images in their texinfo documents disabling them 
> for 
> the info support and only enabling them for html/pdf export.  E.g., I 
> recently 
> provided a patch to GNU Octave to change this but still there are cases where 
> it shows a "no image" text instead.

Can it be related to "Yelp" (the GNOME documentation viewer) nominally
supporting images, but if you start it on documentation containing not
merely a few novelty images but documenting every feature with example
images (like the LilyPond info tree does), it will hang literally
forever?

Emacs is the _only_ Info reader I know that can handle the LilyPond
documentation including images.  The standalone info reader is not
phased by the LilyPond documentation, but it does not show the images
either.

> But I have to agree that info(1) is just confusing and weird.  I only
> started liking info pages after I started to use the GNU Emacs info
> reader.

Yes, and it is the only one really worth using.  But Texinfo has more
output formats than just Info.

-- 
David Kastrup