Re: Broken link at http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2008 at 10:35:42AM +0200, John Mandereau wrote:

> 1) clearly separating parsing from formatting,
> 2) using GUILE to store parsed Texinfo input, so one can write Scheme
> code to play with this input,
> 3) making HTML output completely customizable (like texi2html), using
> GUILE (like LilyPond),

In case it wasn't clear, texi2html does the 3 items (except that the
tree is not a GUILE tree, but a tree of perl references).

There are 3 passes in texi2html, in the first pass, the @macro are
expanded and ignored regions are removed (like @ignore, but also
@ifsomething if something is not used, raw sections like @tex, 
and also @ifclear...), and the following macros are processed: 
@definfoenclose, @include.

In the second pass, the indexes, anchors, floats, node and section tree,
footnotes, printindex are collected, and a tree of the document is
constructed, in order to be able to have cross-reference working right.

And in the last pass the output expansion occurs.

There is a 'bug', to protect a comma , in @node when appearing in @, @, 
is replaced by @m_cedilla, it is not the right way to go, but I am too 
lazy to parse @node like any other command.

If you want to have a look at how things are done in texi2html, there
are 2 things that I think should be dropped from a texinfo converter, 
namely the index splitting, and the possibility to have things like

@emph{Bla.

New paragraph.} 


I am the main and most of the time only author of the code that does the 
parsing of texinfo (though not necessarily the regexp), and I can put
any piece of my code in the public domain if you want to reuse/translate 
it.

--
Pat