man vs info vs texinfo files

[Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams]

On Fri, 2009-03-06 at 01:03 -0800, Per Bothner wrote:

> > No, the far more sane option is to fix info or pinfo so that it catches
> > SIGWINCH and reflows as necessary.
> 
> No, that's not feasible.  The info file format just doesn't contain the
> necessary information: It's a more-or-less plain ASCII file, and doesn't
> distinguish between hard and soft linefeeds, for example.  Plus you
> don't have the information needed to pick the correct fonts.  Cross-
> references only identify a named node, rather than a specific paragraph.
> All of that information *is* in the texinfo source.

Fair enough.

> The proposal is:
> (1) Gnome/KDE help viewers and similar programs should not
> display pre-formatted info files, but instead either
> (a) format texinfo files on the fly, or
> (b) display pre-formatted html or docbook that have
> been generated from texinfo.
> 
> (2a) (Optionally) To avoid the redundancy of installing both texinfo
> and pre-formatted html or docbook one could save disk space
> by having info-reading programs cause the makeinfo program be
> invoked automatically as needed.
> 
> Alternatively:
> 
> (2b) Universally replace info format by xhtml, generated from
> makeinfo, and modify the info program and the emacs info mode
> to be able to read these xhtml files, possibly using elinks
> and w3m as a basis.  But this is a larger project - I'd
> think focusing on (1) and maybe (2a) would be easier.

Sounds good, but how much CPU does it take to convert texinfo into...
something else? And does it need all of TeXlive in order to do it?

-- 
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams <ivazqueznet at gmail.com>

PLEASE don't CC me; I'm already subscribed
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