Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Achim Gratz]

Christopher Allan Webber writes:
>> FYI: Org-mode supports HTML, Texinfo and more:
>>
>> http://orgmode.org/manual/Exporting.html
>
> Right... I more mean, how much work is there to make it usable for a
> manual the size of emacs', and also make it look nice and modern?

Thomas S. Dye has attempted to re-write the Org manual in Org itself and
I have added provisional support for it to be built eith the Org build
system.  The internal parsing and export machinery is undergoing a
significant change at this time in Org that did not made it into Emacs
yet, so at the moment that project lays dormant and the (outdated) Org
manual in Org does not build without extra patches.  Aside from that,
one of the problems is that very large documents with lots of headings
and subheadings export very slowly, due to superlinear complexity.  Some
of this would not be necessary during export (the document to be
exported is not edited and so some of the re-parsing necessary during
editing could be dropped perhaps).  If the manual was broken up into
individual parts that slowdown would become much less noticeable, but
that would require the manuals to be split into, let's say, one file per
section.  So the folks that are unhappy with Texinfo 5 because it is
slow would be even less happy with Org at this moment.  For comparison,
the Org manual is near the median of the size distribution for Emacs'
other manuals and the largest two (Gnus and Calc) are roughly twice the
size.


Regards,
Achim.
-- 
+<[Q+ Matrix-12 WAVE#46+305 Neuron microQkb Andromeda XTk Blofeld]>+

Wavetables for the Waldorf Blofeld:
http://Synth.Stromeko.net/Downloads.html#BlofeldUserWavetables