Re: Who likes Info files?
Tom Christiansen (tchrist@mox.perl.com)
8 Apr 1995 15:47:25 GMT
In comp.lang.python,
dkuhlman@netcom.com (G. David Kuhlman) writes:
:Piercarlo Grandi (piercarl@sabi.demon.co.uk) wrote:
:: >>> On Tue, 21 Mar 1995 18:18:32 GMT, gilbert@marin.cc.ca.us (Tim Gilbert) said:
:
:: Tim> Personally, info files give me the heebie-jeebies. I would much prefer
:: Tim> html documentation, or even Plain Old Text... Not that I'll complain if
:: Tim> you do it, as long as there is some alternative to info. (One of my
:: Tim> problems with info is that it isn't easy to view from a Mac/Windows
:: Tim> machine unless you install emacs.)
:
:: The Linux documentation project has produced some tool that allow one to
:: annotate documents in something like SGML, and then convert that to
:: plain text, or html, or other formats.
:
:Perl5.0 contains an app called pod2html. It converts a simplified
:mark-up language into HTML. (A Pythoner who objects to using Perl 5
:could probably re-write it pretty easily; it's about 200 lines of
:Perl 5 code.) I use lynx and that makes reading docs pretty easy, but
:I wish I had better search facilities. (grepping files seems crude
:somehow.)
Unless there's a perl2python or python2perl translator, I wouldn't
suggest a rewrite. Otherwise you won't be able to follow any udpates.
Besides a program to translate pod into html, there are also translators
from pod to [nt]roff (that's with the -man package) and latex.
POD isn't anything extraordinary. It stands for "Plain Old Documentation",
and isn't meant to be an html replacement. It's really quite simple.
--tom
--
Tom Christiansen Perl Consultant, Gamer, Hiker tchrist@mox.perl.com
150 years ago everybody was a Christian Scientist. --dmr