Re: what is the status of the JavaScript reader?

[Gavin Smith]

On Mon, Aug 03, 2020 at 09:26:31AM -0700, Per Bothner wrote:
> On 8/3/20 6:16 AM, Gavin Smith wrote:
> > The last that was done with it was to distribute it on alpha.gnu.org
> > (https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-js-0.0.90.tar.gz) and
> > advertise it on this mailing list.  I don't know of anybody using it for
> > a real purpose.
> > 
> > I suppose bundling it into the regular Texinfo release would give it
> > more visibility.  It's likely that somebody would like to use it.  It is
> > less than a MB when compressed and wouldn't increase the package size
> > too much.
> 
> Currently, I'm building the Kawa and DomTerm [https://domterm.org] docs (and 
> websites)
> using a toolchain involving docbook and xsltproc.  This works fine, but it 
> makes for
> more complicated build requirements and process.  It would be nice to migrate
> towards an all-texinfo tool chain, assuming it can be made equally functional.
> I recently added a --without-docbook option to the DomTerm configure,
> but that only builds the traditional --html documentation, without the 
> navigation bar.

Have you tried using the Texinfo JS interface for the Kawa and DomTerm 
manuals?  It seems to me there would be nothing stopping you from doing 
this now.

> > In a separate development, I started a WebKitGTK based browser for
> > Texinfo HTML documentation, but lost interest in it.  (Embeddable HTML
> > renderers all seem quite awkward to use.)  I've posted about this before
> > on this list.
> 
> I wrote a 48-line mini-browser using webview:
> https://github.com/webview/webview
> https://github.com/PerBothner/DomTerm/blob/master/native/webview.cc
> I haven't tested it on Windows, but it seems to work ok on Fedora and on MacOS
> (with some downsides compared to using Electron).
> Note the webview.h file in the same directory is just copied from the Webview 
> distribution.

That says that webview is a wrapper around WebKit and some other web 
engines on different platforms.  I don't see how using that is going to 
avoid the difficulties of using WebKitGTK.

The program was nearly finished with WebKitGTK, anyway.  The work was on 
the webkitgtk-info branch of the git repo:

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/texinfo.git/log/?h=webkitgtk-info

https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/video/demo.webm

If I remember correctly there were a couple of problems to fix.  One was 
that the sidebar TOC wasn't updated correctly for a link between 
manuals.  The other was that the program was written using a WebKitGTK 
API that was later deprecated.  I haven't tried to build it recently.