[fpc-devel] FPC 2.2 online documentation problem

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> Hi
> 
> Looking at the online documentation at:
>   http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/prog/prog.html
> 
> The html navigation seems to be broken. I remember a few months back
> someone also raised such a issue and was under the impression it was
> fixed.  Is this a recurring problem or was the original issue never
> fixed?
> 
[cut]

No idea. 
It seems that the tex4ht conversion is not very good after all :/
  
> Michael, I'm not dissing your documentation efforts. :)  The content
> is great.  I just think the LaTeX to HTML conversion has some major
> issues?  DocBook HTML navigation seems to be much simpler.  Isn't
> there a LaTeX to DocBook to HTML path we could follow?  Or use a
> different LaTeX to HTML converter?

In the beginning we used latex2html. The problem is that the documentation
is simply too big. It takes days to convert (what do you expect from a perl
program...) so we switched to tex4ht.

Personally, I would drop the HTML support completely and simply provide
PDF for the manuals. I must spend far too much time on it. And unless
someone takes over the conversion effort, this probably is what will 
happen.

Note that I do not propose to drop HTML support for the unit reference
guides; The HTML support of fpdoc is not under question.

Michael.