Re: Common source for man page and info document?

[Charles Levert]

* On Monday 2005-11-14 at 16:50:23 +0000, Julian Foad wrote:
> (I received the following suggestion by private mail.  Thanks, Matt.  - 
> Julian.)
> 
> * Matt Burgess wrote:
> > The first thing that springs to mind here is DocBook XML[0].  There are
> > stylesheets[1] that can convert the same DocBook XML source files into
> > TexInfo and man page formats.  The stylesheets at [2] don't have support
> > for TexInfo, though they do support outputting man pages.  I've not used
> > the man page specific stylesheets, but have had great success in
> > generating HTML and PDF using the docbook-xsl package.

This implies converting, presumably by hand,
our whole documentation to DocBook XML in the
first place.

This is a chore in and of itself, and our
resources are already limited.

Another issue is that leaders from the GNU
Project are bound to remind us that this goes
against the Project's policy.  (And likely to
notice and do so only _after_ we've gone through
the trouble of an eventual conversion.)


> > [0]http://docbook.org/
> > [1]http://docbook2x.sourceforge.net/
> > [2]http://sourceforge.net/projects/docbook/

DocBook XML is nice.  My remarks above don't
dispute (or even address) that.



There is a more important issue than the actual
coding syntax used for the source of grep's
documentation (*XML, TeX*, or *roff), or the
language used for transformation (Perl, XSLT,
or ...).  A TeXinfo book and a man page organize
the same content differently; they have different
layouts.  This has to be coded somewhere and
may be why past attempts at generating one
from the other have had mitigated success.
(See my remarks about @ifman in another message.)



Otherwise, I have looked around.
There is a Perl script in

   <ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/units/units-1.85.tar.gz>
                                units-1.85/texi2man

There is a probable descendant of it at

   <http://siliconbrain.com/siliconBrain/sourceTree/texi2man.perl>

Both are hackish and generally single-purpose.