Re: A replacement for Info

[Patrice Dumas]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 12:37:10AM +0000, Karl Berry wrote:
>        What about just Texinfo, or Texinfo-as-sexps?
> 
>     If it works, why not?  Stefan, would this work?
> 
> These days, as I keep repeating to no apparent effect, another viable --
> as far as I can see, the best -- approach is use the Texinfo XML output
> as your input.  This XML is an essentially complete representation of
> the input, but without the Texinfo syntax and option peculiarities, as
> described above.

(As a disclaimer, I only have a very basic knowledge of lisp or
s-exprs.)

Maybe another possibility would be to have an intermediate
representation of Texinfo as a data s-expression, which would be
generated by makeinfo and further processed by emacs/guile or any
program that likes s-expressions.  That's something we discussed a
bit with Andy in the GHM in Paris.  There hasn't been much progress on
that front, but I believe this would be fairly easy to do once somebody
tells me what the sexprs for a Texinfo tree should look like.  Then
this representation could either be shipped just like we ship the info
files, or maybe cached --- since generating it takes quite a bit of
time --- such that the rendering may be done rather quickly.

The sexpr would be very similar with the generated XML in terms of
information embedded.

-- 
Pat