[fpc-devel] Too big documentation images

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sun, 25 May 2008, Marco van de Voort wrote:

> > On Sun, 25 May 2008 10:31:23 +0200 (CEST)
> > Michael Van Canneyt <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:
> > > > My idea would be just taking the current ones and cutting the white
> > > > area. Shouldn't that be enougth?
> > > 
> > > No, because they would be overwritten the next time the docs are
> > > built.
> > 
> > So, the biggest issue is to find a latex to html converter?
> 
> It has been an issue for 10 years now.

Exactly. There are 4 converters:

Latex2html - a huge perl script which needs more time and memory than God 
     needed to create the earth, to convert the docs.  We dumped it because 
     it simply takes too long. It's good for small documents (articles), but
     not for books.

tex4ht - Was very good, but has some issues. Problem is that it's no longer
         maintained, and is no longer included in e.g. SuSE.

Hevea - also good, but is written in objective caml (and I thought Pascal was considered obscure)
        so it also doesn't install easily on a SuSE system.

tex2rtf - Very good, fast. But only supports a subset of latex, not enough for the documentation.

We once toyed with the idea of writing our own, but this is a monumental task. 
I can barely find the time to maintain fpdoc, let alone a full-blown latex parser.
Although if someone writes one, I'll certainly put my shoulders under that...

Add to all that the fact that I never intended the docs to be converted to HTML
in the first place - and I still don't - and you end up with the situation as it
is now.

Note that this only concerns the manuals, not the unit references. fpdoc creates
good HTML, and this will definitely be maintained.

Michael.