Re: .devhelp generator for --html mode in makeinfo

[Gavin Smith]

On 15 March 2015 at 22:33, Dimitri John Ledkov <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> It would be tremendously useful to have makeinfo --html to generate .devhelp
> file. That way GNU developer documentation (e.g. gcc/automake/autoconf)
> could be searched and viewed using GNOME Devhelp and thus have one more way
> to be viewed.
>
> In the past texi2html output was scanned and processed to generate a
> .devhelp file.
>
> All that .devhelp file has is essentially indexes and metadata:
> * document info
> * Table of Context
> * Reference Index of Symbols
>

Can you point to documentation of the .devhelp format? From what you
have listed I don't think it would be difficult to output a file with
this information. HTML+Devhelp could be supported as an additional
output format.

> I quickly looked at tp/Texinfo/Convert but I am struggling to learn it as to
> how to make HTML.pm generate one more file with xml index in the devhelp
> format.

What I would think is to have a flag variable saying whether to output
a Devhelp file, which would be set depending on the options given to
makeinfo. Elements for index entry commands are processed a few
places: _convert_index_command, _convert_def_line_type, and
_convert_item_command. However it might be possible to output the
index information somewhere else. URL's to the referents of the index
entries could be generated by looking at the collected index
information available from "$self->{'parser'}->indices_information()".
See the _prepare_index_entries for an example. The file could be
output by the "output" function in HTML.pm, or possibly by a different
function called directly from texi2any.pl.