Texinfo Priorities

[Randall Sawyer]

In consideration of composing a parser-or-converter of my own to 
generate more easily navigable HTML pages, I wrote a perl script which 
uses package 'Texinfo::Common', scans all of its %*_commands hash 
tables. The script then produces a tab-delmited text file containing all 
texinfo commands and their memberships within each subset encountered. I 
then imported this output into a spreadsheet app.

This exercise provided me a more informed assessment of what texinfo is. 
It has helped me to better make sense of the documentation of the 
various commands of texinfo. The following is a list of the priorities 
of texinfo as I see them. Please, feel free to correct me if you disagree.

Master #1: (La|Te)?TeX: formatted structured content
Content of texinfo files are converted into hard copy book or manual.

Master #2: info: navigable content
Content of texinfo files are converted into info files navigable within 
a terminal. Formatting is constrained.

Peer #1: XML: document content
Content of texinfo files are converted into equivalent XML.

Client #1: DocBook: structured content
Content of texinfo files are converted into electronic book content - 
which is in turn convertible into other XML formats.

Client #2: HTML: navigable structured content
Content of texinfo files are converted into HTML content. Formatting 
provided via CSS.

Client #3: plaintext: content
Content of texinfo files are converted into into plain text fileas. 
Formatting is constrained.