Re: Displaying images for html output

[Gavin Smith]

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 12:46:35AM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> I think that
> the point is to copy the image file from where it is found to the
> destination directory.

Could this break the build systems of any existing manuals that use images?
Are there any manuals that we could check?

Also, what if the image files are out-of-date?

I looked at the gendocs.sh script from gnulib, which would be one of
the most usual ways for people to generate HTML manuals that they
will upload to a website.  It does take care of copying images,
copying them after running texi2any.  This should be harmless if it
does it twice, just potentially slow if a manual has many images, but
gendocs.sh could potentially be altered to check if the files already
exist.

It could be a benefit if texi2any does it instead of gendocs.sh, as there
is this comment in gendocs.sh, at the copy_images function:

# copy_images OUTDIR HTML-FILE...
# -------------------------------
# Copy all the images needed by the HTML-FILEs into OUTDIR.
# Look for them in . and the -I directories; this is simpler than what
# makeinfo supports with -I, but hopefully it will suffice.

I'm thinking that Texinfo's manual needs some images in it, for the dual
benefit of testing, and of showing people reading the Texinfo manual that
images actually are supported.  Some ideas:

These could be a proper diagrams, instead of ASCII art:

https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Tree-Structuring.html#Tree-Structuring

https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Heading-Format.html

Does Anybody want to create this?  We'd need at least a .png version,
and optionally a .eps version for dvi output.  It should be in black
and white or at least look good in greyscale.

Some manual-related humour, if we could get permission from the author
(the non-commercial licence is no good):  https://xkcd.com/1343/

Maybe some photographs of old (historically important?) manuals (for
software or otherwise), or of somebody reading a book while fixing
something, to show the human side and importance of good documentation,
if anybody has an idea for something appropriate.  Perhaps with a
caption like "systems are useless unless users understand how to
use them".