[Gardeners] texinfo/documentation

[David Trudgett]

On Monday 2006-01-09 at 14:31:30 -0800, Peter Seibel wrote:

> > Anyway, that's just my 2c worth, because I was surprised docbook-xml
> > wasn't mentioned earlier.
> 
> Just to throw another hat in the ring, it might be interesting to try  
> using Lisp itself. Between the ease of generating HTML from s- 
> expressions and generating nice PDF output using Marc Battyani's cl- 
> typesetting library, it might be a useful exercise to generate a  
> native, Lisp-programmable documentation generation system. A starting  
> point might be my own Markup library:
> 
>    <http://www.gigamonkeys.com/lisp/markup/>
> 
> I am by no way suggesting that this is as mature as something like  
> texinfo or docbook-xml but it has the advantage that using it, and  
> adapting it to our actual needs will force us to eat our own dogfood  
> and will result in the automatic gardening of the libraries we use.
> 
> In fact, an excellent gardener's project (one suggested to me when we  
> were first starting by Edi Weitz) would be to write a user manual for  
> cl-typesetting and cl-pdf. They are, I can attest, excellent  
> libraries, but have almost no documentation. 

It's a fascinating idea, Peter, though out of my league (and timewise)
at the moment. I might be able to *help out* documenting
cl-typesetting or cl-pdf, though (after coming to grips with them
myself, since I haven't used them). It's not something I can commit to
as a sole contributor, however, since I have other rather pressing
concerns that need my attention, unfortunately.

David



-- 
David Trudgett
http://www.zeta.org.au/~wpower/
PGP Public Key: http://www.zeta.org.au/~wpower/keys/david.asc


Honesty subverts!

    -- Kendall Clark