Re: Documentation for Texinfo - Sphinx

[Richard Stallman]

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  > Looking at the sphinx documentation, I see that it can generate texinfo
  > documents--is there a similar conversion from texinfo to sphinx? Is that
  > what you want documented?

I don't think there is an automatic converter.  And we don't need one
(though it would be nice), since any given manual would only need to
be converted once.  A guide for converting by hand would be
sufficient.

It needs to be complete, and cover all the unusual things people do
occasionally in Texinfo.  That includes use of some raw TeX commands.
If people encounter something in Texinfo sources that the guide does
not cover, they will be stumped.

But you don't have to be a TeX wizard to start writing the guide.
There is plenty to write that any user of Sphinx and Texinfo can do.

  > So it seems like it should be possible to perform the following
  > transformations:

  > texinfo -> html [using texinfo tools presumably]
  > html -> xhtml [using iconv + tidy]
  > xhtml -> reST [using xhtml2rest]

This won't give the right results because many manuals have
conditionals in them, such as @iftex.  The right conversion is to
convert them into conditionals so as to handle all the cases right.
However, texinfo -> html would only handle one case correctly.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
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