[Geany] the fine manual

[Nick Treleaven]

On 08/01/2007 05:13:27 PM, Enrico Tröger wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:57:40 -0400, "John Gabriele"
> <jmg3000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Updating Geany's manual is, IMO, a bit of a chore. Just my
> preference
> > I suppose, but working with docbook to write docs seems way too
> > onerous. There's a lot of tags to remember, and the whole thing is
> > very <emphasis>very</emphasis> verbose. But most of all, docbook is
> > not very pretty to read in source form.
> > [...]
> > So, after having looked at many different doc markup schemes in the
> > meantime (at things like Texinfo, Perl POD, Perl 6 Pod, TeX, LaTeX,
> > Markdown, Textile, and so on), I finally found something that was
> easy
> > to read and write, fairly good looking (even as plain text), 
> capable
> > for large documents, well-supported, and that is able to act as a
> > source format to be converted to various other formats:
> > reStructuredText (aka "reST").
> > 
> > Fast forward to today, I went ahead and manually converted the
> manual
> > to reST. Here's the result:

Did it take long to convert? Seems like a lot of work.

> > * http://www.milliwatt-software.com/jmg/temp/geany.txt -- the 
> source
> > text
> > * http://www.milliwatt-software.com/jmg/temp/geany.html -- default
> > style
> > * http://www.milliwatt-software.com/jmg/temp/geany2.html -- with
> Geany
> > stylesheet
> > * http://www.milliwatt-software.com/jmg/temp/geany3.html -- with my
> > own stylesheet
> Wow, it looks very promising. I must admit your stylesheet is very
> nice, IMO not yet perfect, but much cooler than mine(which was just
> stolen from Xfce ;-)).
> 
> Another advantage is that it doesn't need as many dependencies as
> docbook and probably is easier to use at all (yes, using the docbook
> tools to generate something from the source can be a mess ;-( ).
> 
> I think we could change not yet completely sure but it looks nice.
> What
> do you think?
> 
I think it looks good, I don't mind docbook, but it would be easier to 
write reST. But is it equivalent - can it split up the generated HTML 
into one page per chapter/per section etc? Also can it generate PDFs?

Regards,
Nick

P.S. for anyone interested:
link: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
fedora package name: python-docutils