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Introduction: How I got here
From: |
Randall Sawyer |
Subject: |
Introduction: How I got here |
Date: |
Wed, 26 Jul 2017 19:06:00 -0400 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.7.1 |
I am a long-time Linux/GNU-Hurd user.
I write code primarily in C, C++, Perl, HTML and CSS.
I am willing to contribute.
You may consider my motivation as that of "cognitive accessibility".
If I were reading software documentation on hard bound books, then I
would be the sort of researcher with lots of labeled bookmarks in the
pages and lists of where to find the information I need taped to the wall.
For example:
In order to put the contents of HTML documentation originating from the
gtk-doc format at my finger tips, I found it helpful to write a Perl
script which locates and converts all of the gtk-doc HTML index.html
files on my system and writes them into HTML files which contain a
left-hand sidebar of table-of-contents, a right-hand scrollable iframe
displaying content and a drop-down list of neighboring documentation in
the top left corner of the page. I have found this reformatting to be
indispensible to helping me to navigate documentation. In the spirit of
generosity, I posted this script - named "gtk-doc-navigator.pl" - and a
screen-shot on the now defunct site gtkforums.com. The script was
downloaded nearly 250 the last time I checked.
I want to become more proficient with tools such as 'autoconf, 'make'
and other GNU-oriented apps and libraries. In order to assist my
learning, I want to be able to convert existing documentation as I did
with gtk-doc-navigator.pl.
Because I find the HTML output of makeinfo to be rather clunky as a
starting point - as compared to that of gtk-doc - I have decided to
familiarize myself with Texinfo in consideration of writing my own
texinfo parser and/or converter.
NOTE: I have a few points and questions regarding Texinfo. Instead of
overwhelming and alienating readers of the mailing list, I have decided
to break up what I have to say into a number of discrete postings.
NOTE: I have supplied myself with a large sample of existing texinfo
files on which to experiemnt by writing a script which crawls the page
https://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html for for links to pages with links
to downloadable *.texi.gz bundles. That fetched 110 files.
NOTE: If you want a copy of 'gtk-doc-navigator.pl' for yourself to see,
I will send it to you upon request. It is fast - less than 0.1sec sys
time for 81 source directories on a 12-year-old single processor laptop.
You will need to have the perl package HTML::TreeBuilder installed
(https://metacpan.org/pod/HTML::TreeBuilder).
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