Re: Comments wanted on code highlighting in PDF output

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 21/02/2022 à 19:17, Luca Fascione a écrit :
> I haven't worked wirh TexInfo markup before, however it occurs to me
> that lisp is regular enough that with some effort one could hope to 
> scrape out a majority of the function definitions
> and then use such a database to touch up the help source?



Not sure I understand the link with Scheme/Lisp, but
if you want such an autogenerated database, you can grab
this script:

https://github.com/pygments/pygments/blob/master/external/lilypond-builtins-generator.ly

It's the source of the lists of builtins in Pygments.
(I hope to integrate some form of it in core LilyPond
at some point so other tools like Frescobaldi could use
it as well, but I have been too busy lately).


> Like if you imagine a strategy like this:
>  - scrape out what you can with a script (targeting to find 90% or so 
> of what's there)
>  - add an exception list hand-curated (which mops up the rest)
>  - use this stuff to find and 'parse' the contents of the help so that 
> you can then transform it into something else
> this could give you some 90-95% of the source revised.
>  - mop up again the result by hand
>
> If this were a one-off affair, it could be a way to go,
> it sounds more painful that it often ends up being, the key being to 
> find a good balance
> between how robust your scrapers are wrt how much manual effort is to 
> go back and mop things up.
>
> I know the docs for lilypond are a huge set, and I'm not sure how 
> translations are implemented.
> I'm not suggesting now it's a good time to do this, however if one 
> were to consider such a thing, this seems like it could be a way to do it,
> purely because Lisp-y things are easy to parse, which makes them 
> relatively robust to detecting decorations such as @var{}



Unlike its fellow extension language, LilyPond is not
easy to parse *at all* (just glance at lily/parser.yy),
but it is true that Texinfo is easy to parse. I'm not sure
how robust such a script could be, only experience can tell.

Well, and we're all volunteers here. Feel free to work on
it :-)  (Especially since it's a task that can be done with
little prior knowledge of the code base).

Cheers,
Jean



> I've used pygmentize in other projects and it can look quite 
> beautiful, once you get it going.
> I like how it's able to provide a unified look to a number of 
> different languages, making the final result
> look consistent while making it clear what language is what.
> (I've done a fair bit of LaTeX over the years)
>
> Luca