Documentation

Sigh. Unix documentation, balkanization. Clearly we have to ship with a man page. It's a very long time since I've written anything in troff. For some recent projects, I've used pod to produce man pages. For one I wrote the documentation in XHTML and wrote a Haskell monadic combinator parser to output -man troff from that (OK, so that was insane).

These days, I am an enormous fan of reStructuredText (although not the language that spawned it), and I am on a one-person crusade to stop reST becoming the Betamax to markdown's VHS. So if all I want is a man page, then rst2man is the way to go.

But I am intending pacc eventually to be a GNU project. So I suppose I should write a texinfo manual, and use help2man to generate a minimal man page. I suppose I could quickly try the second half... And, y'know, it actually doesn't do too bad a job, if you can stand that sort of manual page. Hmm...

So here's one possibility: rst2texinfo exists. Come to that, the wonderful pandoc can do the job too (although I have found a few shortcomings in its reST parser (yes, I should fix them and submit patches)). But that's not going to work out well. For example, my reST markup uses a fixed-width font for command text and filenames, whereas texinfo distinguishes those.

I guess the Right Thing is to write a proper texinfo manual. I dislike the texinfo HTML output, but that can probably be smartened up with a modicum of XSLT and a sprinkling of CSS. And it does look nice on paper, of course. OK. I've avoided texinfo as far as possible for all these years, but let's give it a go.

Some random notes as I convert the reST documentation to texinfo.

• texinfo is about as annoying to write as pod, but of course it does more.
• the TeX backend doesn't support Unicode, which is a pain as we really need to talk about the Unicode characters that pacc can use. I'm not going to worry about this too much, as it rather looks like there's a fix in Fedora rawhide already.

I've now converted all the documentation I have into texinfo, and I'm reasonably pleased with the result. Of course, more documentation is needed, and the texinfo source can also be spruced up with nodes and index entries.