Re: The texinfo used by GSL

[Eleftherios Gkioulekas <lf@amath.washington.edu>]

>
>Plan A is to convert the documentation to Docbook and generate standard
>texinfo from that, making the modified texinfo unnecessary.  
>
>After writing the equation handling code for texinfo I decided that it had
>been the wrong way to do things, since texinfo is complicated (particularly
>the texinfo.tex file, where there are many subtleties involving fonts).
>

I think that regardless of plan A, it would be neat to make the 
@equation ... @end equation construct part of the official Texinfo
as well as the extension used in the titlepage. 

One idea that I had is that it would be cool to have an Emacs command
that detects occurances of:
@equation
....
@end equation
and then adds:
@ifhtml
<img src="..." ....>
@end ifhtml
@ifinfo
FIXME 
@end ifinfo
where the corresponding image file is automatically generated by taking
the content between @equation and @end equation passing it through tex, 
and taking the resulting dvi file through dvips, ghostscript and another 
program and creating a jpg file. This way one can write math that appear 
as math in the printed version and as image files in the html version. 
I think that this conversion can be automated, so it should be automated.

On the info side of things, there's a choice:
1. Extend info to support inline images.
2. Write a parser that translates equations to text
3. Allow person to do 2. manually
Option 3. can be easily done to get a working system. Options 1. and 2.
would probably be better approaches, but require more work. I would favor
option 1, but an argument can be made that we want Texinfo to be translatable
to pure text. Then option 2 would make more sense. Finally, one might argue
that converting an equation to ASCII is an art, so it should be left to
the artistic talent of the author, therefore option 3. I am undecided on
which approach is really the Right Thing.

Elef.

>----------
>> From: Eleftherios Gkioulekas <lf@amath.washington.edu>
>> To: gsl-discuss@sourceware.cygnus.com
>> Subject: The texinfo used by GSL
>> Date: 20 January 1999 20:00
>> 
>> 
>> Two questions:
>> 
>> Will the patched version of texinfo used to document GSL be merged
>> with the official texinfo stream?
>> 
>> There's quite a few things that could be done to make Texinfo's support
>> for documentation of scientific libraries nicer. Where should such ideas
>> be posted?
>> 
>> Elef.