Swarm documentation: now available in `info' format...

[Alex Lancaster]

After an initial spurt of effort trying to get this to work some time
ago, a new version of docbook2texi was released, making it possible to
generate the Swarm [Objective C] documentation in everybody's
favourite format: `info'!

Currently, only the snapshot of the Swarmdocs and Swarm as they exists
in CVS right now is available [changes to Swarmdocs were required to
make this work].  However, since most of the Swarm interface is
backwardly compatible with 2.1.1, it should still be useful.

Get them at:

 ftp://ftp.swarm.org/pub/swarm/src/testing/installbook-2000-07-03-info.tar.gz 
 ftp://ftp.swarm.org/pub/swarm/src/testing/overbook-2000-07-03-info.tar.gz    
 ftp://ftp.swarm.org/pub/swarm/src/testing/refbook-2000-07-03-info.tar.gz     

Advantages:

* `info' documents are completely searchable: (can also use regular
  expression in searching!) across the individual pages in the entire
  module, HTML is not.

* small footprint: `info' is lightweight documentation reader, doesn't
  require you to fire up a lumbering behemoth like Netscape to read
  docs.  Can use `info' on a text terminal without compromising the
  viewability of the docs.

* smaller and fewer files than HTML: 144k for the tarball of `refbook'
  vs. 800k for the HTML version.

Caveats:

* Not all elements (and some mainly-unimportant text) that are present
  in the original DocBook sources are available in the info version.
  Many simply don't make sense (no graphics for example) and there are
  still some conversion issues to resolve, but 95-99% of the core
  information is there.

* Only Objective C for the moment.  It will be interesting to see
  whether the JavaDoc/doclet infrastructure that we currently use, can
  be extended far enough to generate TexInfo docs for the Java
  version.  I don't have a great deal of time to be able to devote to
  this right now, if someone is interested in helping out with the
  conversion, please let me know.

Enjoy!

Alex
-- 
Alex Lancaster * address@hidden * www.santafe.edu/~alex * 505 984-8800 x242
Santa Fe Institute (www.santafe.edu) & Swarm Development Group (www.swarm.org)

                  ==================================
   Swarm-Support is for discussion of the technical details of the day
   to day usage of Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp.
   [un]subscribing), please send a message to <address@hidden>
   with "help" in the body of the message.