On Tue, 9 Jul 1996, Daniel Pead wrote:

> ... Is there a RISC-OS hosted TeXinfo viewer?

TeXinfo is basically the source form - you run it through a program
to produce Info files that can be used by the Emacs hypertext help
system or through TeX (or is that LaTeX?) with the right macros to
make the printed version of your online documentation.

Basically this is the right sort of approach. In my opinion we want
some sort of structured source material which the persons preparing
and editing the documentation either write raw or can easily convert
into. Whatever is choosen needs to be able to be automatically
transformable into (at least):

  * Plain ASCII - for reading in !Edit before one has a
    working BSD system or throwing directly to a printer.

  * Something that can be used to produce "nice" printed
    output (DVI, PostScript, something like that).

  * HTML - to provide platform independent online hypertext
    documentation which can be put on the Web site and also
    read from local files using Mosaic or whatever once people
    have their system up and running.

Emacs info format would be a nice extra, if it were possible.

The tool that comes to mind for me is LaTeX, in combination with the
LaTeX2HTML translator - but I'm not sure that you can get very good
plain ASCII out of LaTeX.

Having just done a little bit of poking around I think that the suggestion
made earlier by Andy Mell that we could use the SGML stuff developed
by the Linux Documentation Project is an excellent one. The system
that they have developed for producing the Linux HOWTO documents has
all the features that I outlined above. The markup language that one
writes looks a bit LaTeXish and a bit HTMLish - anyone could pick it up
easily. All the output formats we could want for seem to be possible.

Check out any decent Linux mirror site for some examples of what they've
done. For example:

http://sunsite.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/Linux/sunsite.unc-mirror/docs/HOWTO/

This directory contains the plain ASCII text - look in the subdirectory
"other-formats" for the SGML source and the PostScript, HTML, etc.

Documentation for their documentation tools can be found at:

ftp://ftp.mcc.ac.uk/pub/linux/docs/Linuxdoc-SGML.html

Regards,

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Neil Hoggarth                                 Departmental Computer Officer
<neil.hoggarth@physiol.ox.ac.uk>                   Laboratory of Physiology
http://www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/~njh/                     Oxford University, UK
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