Re: A replacement for Info

[Patrice Dumas]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 04:51:51PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> 
> We're talking about having Emacs read Texinfo format, not converting
> it to some other format. 

But that's the part that is hard to do the same way in every parsers.
The conversion is not problematic, it may be different for different
formatters.

> After all, if we want to replace Info format, Emacs will have
> to implement SOME additional format.  And the code in makeinfo that
> we use to convert Texinfo won't be the code Emacs uses for this.

But it could still be possible to have makeinfo parse the Texinfo and
converts it to a format that allows emacs to easily render this format
while not having to do the parsing part.  It may be worth it to separate
the parsing (still done by makeinfo) and the rendering, done by emacs.

This is in fact analogous with what the new perl implementation of 
makeinfo does, it first parses the Texinfo code and constructs a tree 
with all the informations about the Texinfo input, that can then be 
converted to the different output formats.  This would add another 
step --- currently the XML output may be used for that too --- going
through a representation of a tree consistent with makeinfo parsing
that may be easily ingested by emacs, at least more easily than the 
original Texinfo.

-- 
Pat