Re: [avrdude-dev] Documentation build tools requirements - many complaints

[E. Weddington]

Joerg Wunsch wrote:

> As Brian Dean wrote:
>
>  
>
> > Would folks here object too loudly if we trimmed down the
> > documentation of AVRDUDE to just the Unix man page?
> >    
>
>  

Yes.

> > Does Windows support Unix man pages?
> >    
>
> Not even WinAVR does.  It ships a `man' command, but that would need a
> lot of hacking before it could be made work.
>  
That's correct. And even if somebody got 'man' working on Windows, most 
Windows users wouldn't think to use it. man is not a typical doc 
distrubution mechanism on Windows.

>  
>
> > The reason I ask is that many folks have trouble building avrdude
> > from source.
> >    
>
> Why don't you go the way avr-libc did?  Use configure --enable-docs in
> order to build them, and default to being disabled.
>  
I would second this.

Another option, that I'm exploring for both a "WinAVR user manual" and 
for avr-libc, is the use of AsciiDoc (google for it). It's a text file, 
with very minimal formatting that gets translated by the "asciidoc" 
program, a Python script, and it can output HTML and Docbook (as well as 
LinuxDoc). The HTML would be fine for Windows users, the DocBook format 
could be converted (eventually) to PDF, oh and AsciiDoc can also convert 
to man pages as well. The nice thing is that the original source file is 
text and is easy to write and modify unlike some other formats. Since 
AsciiDoc is python, it's also easily customized.

Something to think about.

Eric