Re: [vile] online help-file

[J. Chris Coppick]

Paul Fox wrote:
> sorry for the delay -- just recovered from a major server failure.
> 
> thomas wrote:
>  > On Mon, 2 Nov 2009, J. Chris Coppick wrote:
>  > 
>  > > Thomas Dickey wrote:
>  > >> On Sun, 1 Nov 2009, Paul Fox wrote:
>  > >>
>  > >>> thomas wrote:
>  > >>>>
>  > >>>> I'm considering moving vile.hlp to html (and generating the vile.hlp
>  > >>>> file used within the editor from that).  Here's a very first try at
>  > >>>> converting it (no hyperlinks yet):
>  > >>>>
>  > >>>> http://invisible-island.net/vile/vile-hlp.html
>  > >>>>
>  > >
>  > > I think this will break the Help extension, but that's not the end
>  > > of the world.  Someone remind me to fix it later.
>  > 
>  > Offhand, the candidates for generating the text file seem to be lynx and 
>  > (e)links(2), which both put the main-headings in column 1, which seems to 
>  > be all that Help.pm needs.  (I mention elinks since 2-3 of the tables 
>  > exceed lynx's ability to look nice - in particular the one for built-in 
>  > functions, though on the other hand relying on nice but undocumented 
>  > behavior isn't good either ;-).
>  > 
>  > I did look at w3m also, but it puts everything in column 1...
> 
> another possibility is to use an html generator that works from marked up
> text.  i did the docs for RoadMap that way, using a tool called txt2tags:
>     http://roadmap.sourceforge.net/usermanual.html
> 
> the source for that was actually just the (slightly formatted)
> README for the project, for years, until it got too long, then
> i had to break it into a top-level README containing the intro,
> and a doc dir containing the major chapters.  here's the current
> intro section, to give you a sense.  (the table of contents in the
> HTML pages is auto-generated.)
> 
> another possibility would be to maintain the vile help
> file in a meta-format like this, and then generate the distributed
> text file using lynx/elinks from the html that comes from txt2tags.
> 
> just thoughts...
> 
> paul
> 

Pod2html & pod2text.  :-)

   Chris