[latexrefman-discuss] latexrefman / ltxref.org

[Vincent Belaïche]

Feedback below...

Looping also texinfo help.

Le 12/05/2016 12:52, Patrick Gundlach a écrit :
> Hello Vincent,
>
>> Just a few questions to clarify your needs/objectives:
>>
>> - Is your objective to provide a short description (synopsis) for each
>>  command, or do you want to make a reference manual (ie exhaustive and
>>  factual description) ?
>
> well, kind of both. I'd like to have a synopsis for each command /
> package / environment and a concise description as well. The
> description should be long enough to make clear what the command /
> package / .. is about, but not much more. If it takes an example to
> that, than I'd include an example.
>

It seems to me that the latexrefman project is after the same
objective. So the statement made by Karl that:

   The crucial point is that he is coming up with a single sentence to
   describe features, and it would not make sense for us to try to write
   the exact sentence he wants in our manual.  It's a different purpose.

seems not to be what you want to do.

>> - If you don't use Texinfo to make your site, is that just because you
>>  don't know enough Texinfo, otherwise what limitations in Texinfo made
>>  you discard it as the language supporting content production ?
>
> I use XML as an export format and as an input format (round trip). See
> for example
>
> https://ltxref.org/?format=xml
>
> or for a command (not much filled in yet)
>
> https://ltxref.org/cmd/%5Cdocumentclass?format=xml
>
> texinfo is too verbose for me. The idea is to have a fully and easily
> parseable output format to generate more interesting stuff that I am
> not aware of yet. And my day to day work is around XML, so that
> suggests itself to use that. I just need some help / source to fill in
> the gaps.
>
>
>> - What means do you use to develop your site, do you directly write HTML
>>  code plus some javascript and CSS to make it more interactive and look
>>  nicer ?
>
> First I read the XML file into the server and then generate
> (templating system) the HTML files from that.
>
>
> Patrick
>
>

Texinfo can export XML in two ways, either Texinfo own XML, that
represent a machine processable form of the output, and second docbook
XML --- which is a standard format used by some publishers.

Have you investigated whether one of these 2 formats could fulfill your
needs.

The point is that in the latexrefman project we don't use the @deffn and
suchlikes commands for describing commands & environment. So the format
of synopsis is just plain text and it may be difficult for you to grab
the arguments and so on to exploit them with your server program (is
that program done in PHP ?)

I have made a short example attached using @deftypefn, but for
environment I did not find any way to make the second occurrence of the
environment name presented as such (it seems to be some limitation of
Texinfo, no command to recall the function name). Also the indentation
is not so good when you make it multiline (with '@*').

   Vincent.

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