manual organized in topics in Texinfo (similar with Mallard)?

[Patrice Dumas]

Hello,

I stumbled by chance on the Mallard format which is used in the GNOME
project for their documentation:
http://projectmallard.org/about/learn/index.html
http://projectmallard.org/1.1/

What I found interesting is that the documentation is organized by
topics instead of being organized as a book.  It occured to me that
this would correspond to a Texinfo manual based on @node and on
menu navigation.  In my view, "guide" pages could be nodes that link
to "topic" nodes using a menu with the links to topic nodes,
appearing in any order in the menu.  A topic node may also appear
in multiple guide nodes.  Topic nodes would also link back to the
guide nodes they appear in.

Are you aware of Texinfo manuals in the wild following thay kind of
structure in topic, and with that conceptual approach to documentation?


As a side note, some elements of Mallard are not easily transposed in
Texinfo, in particular the pages are somewhat independent, linked
through named menus, and can have internal section structure.  In
Texinfo we have whole manuals that are structurally linked only through
@direntry and @dircategory.  It is not easy in Texinfo to integrate
manual pieces modularily at different levels. They can only be included
simply at the Top level, with @direntry and @dircategory.  For instance
there would probably be a need for automatic raise/lower section, to be
able to tell from the included part in which menu it should be included
and maybe have names for menus...

This could have some "real life" use, for example we have in the Texinfo
manual some parts about Emacs that could also appear in some collection
of emacs manuals, it is not easy to do that naturally in Texinfo for
now.

-- 
Pat