Re: [pcre-dev] manual in Texinfo?

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 3:49 PM, Philip Hazel <ph10@???> wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Feb 2008, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> > I'm wondering if you would consider taking onboard a complete conversion
> > of your manual to Texinfo. (I would do the work.)
>
> I tangled with Texinfo when I was working on the Exim documentation, and
> I have to say that I wasn't particularly happy because it couldn't do
> some of the things that I wanted. Can't remember details offhand, but it
> was stuff like it didn't like certain characters (quotes?) in nodes
> (chapter titles).

I'm not aware of any such problems - it could well be that I haven't
tried to do whatever it was that was a problem, of course.

> I have to say that I'm not really keen on working in yet another (to me
> unfamiliar) documentation format. Old dogs and new tricks and all that.
> The "man" format is easy for me to maintain, and I use only a very
> stylized subset; would it not be easy to write a Perl script to convert
> my "man" input to Texinfo?

I sympathize with your desire not to change formats; unfortunately,
no, an automated conversion is not feasible, because Texinfo is a much
higher-level syntax than "man". For instance, the existing
pcrepattern.3 uses a whole lot of tables done with simple spaces -
that all has to get converted to explicit markup. (How do you do that
for HTML?) And there are a bunch of places where punctuation-type
metacharacters aren't marked up at all in pcrepattern.3, but have to
be in Texinfo.

I'm attaching my pcrepattern.texi so you can see what it looks like.
This was about four hours of nontrivial human effort.

zw