Re: [pcre-dev] manual in Texinfo?

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Zack Weinberg
CC: pcre-dev
Subject: Re: [pcre-dev] manual in Texinfo?
On Mon, 18 Feb 2008, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> 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.


Regrettably, I can't remember, but it might have been quotes in node
names, or possibly underscores. It was a while ago.

> 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?)


I leave them as simple spaces! :-) For example:

<pre>
  (*CR)        carriage return
  (*LF)        linefeed
  (*CRLF)      carriage return, followed by linefeed
  (*ANYCRLF)   any of the three above
  (*ANY)       all Unicode newline sequences
</pre>


> 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.


Surely a simple Perl script can deal with that?

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


Apart from anything else, there's a practical reason for not doing
anything in a hurry, which is that my time is currently limited (even
though I'm retired). But alongside that, I'm not convinced that moving
to Texinfo as a basic format is "right".

What do others on this list think?

Philip

--
Philip Hazel