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Re: lynx-dev Re: What free manuals do we need?


> Is there TeXinfo/HTML/emacs-font-lock support for changebars?

HTML has explicit support, <INS> and <DEL>, although they are unlikely
to be used properly by most authors.

I also remember that there is a change bar preprocessor for *roff,
but maybe not a free software version.

> This might be implemented as a post-process using diff between the old
> and new info files.  HTML can certainly support multiple colors,
> although a program would have to be careful to insert highlights only
> in text (and not markups).

HTML 4.0 strict DOES NOT support colours, only styles.  Please think
in terms of marking up with INS and DEL and then letting the user define
a local style sheet to select the colours, or suppress <DEL></DEL> entirely;
that would be the proper way of using HTML.
 
> I don't see any support in diff for noting columns as well as lines;
> but even if whole lines are marked, this would be useful so long as
> diff ignores whitespace (formatting) changes.
> 

File differencers tend to get unstable at the word level and are likely
to choose the wrong set of differences.  Even MS Word doesn't try to
compute word level changes although it can be configured to track changes
to that level as you type them in.  However, I do seem to remember reading
of a wrapper for diff that will do word level differencing.

Of course, before everything went plug and play, the changes would have
been transmitted as just the differences to be used by patch to change
the document source.

[ Article read on the lynx-dev mailing list and might be rejected by the
  others ]