doc2texi.el and gnuplot-mode contextual help

[Jon O. <j.j...@gm...>]

Hi all,

A couple of months ago I wrote about wanting to support quick
contextual documentation in Emacs' gnuplot-mode, then let it drop as I
was busy with other things.

It's working now and I've submitted two patches for doc2texi.el to the
tracker:

3521460 patches doc2texi to additionally create an Elisp file of ElDoc
strings (Emacs' version of tooltips) extracted from the Syntax:
descriptions in gnuplot.doc. It also compiles it and installs it in
the site-lisp directory. The generated file includes a copy of the
Gnuplot license at the top along with a disclaimer that it is
auto-generated and not meant to be edited by hand.

3521457 fixes a couple of minor bugs (avoiding inserting multiple
copies of the same terminal help, which sometimes happened before)

There's probably little point in merging these unless/until the
corresponding pieces are merged in a new release of gnuplot-mode, but
I wanted to put them out there. If there are any interested Emacs
users on this list they can check out the `context' branch of
gnuplot-mode at
https://github.com/bruceravel/gnuplot-mode/tree/context and see if it
works for them.

I also wanted to ask if it would be OK in the meantime to include a
copy of either (a) the auto-generated 'gnuplot-eldoc.el' strings file
or (b) the patched doc2texi.el, in the gnuplot-mode repository.

Thanks,

Jon




On 9 Feb 2012, at 18:50, Ethan A Merritt wrote:

>>> 
>>> I'd say the better method would be to write a quick doc2tooltip.c
>>> program to parallel the others.  It would look for the string
>>>  Syntax:
>>> in gnuplot.doc and extract the following lines into a tooltip
>>> collection.
>> 
>> 
>> Indeed, that's a better idea; thanks for the suggestion. Now that I
>> look at the docs/ directory I see there is already a `doc2texi.el'
>> contributed by Bruce Ravel, the author of gnuplot-mode. It would
>> probably make the most sense for me to modify that to output an Elisp
>> file of tooltips along with the texinfo file. Any objections?
> 
> No objections. Just a warning that the code in doc2texi.el may itself 
> be a bit rusty.  I seem to recall some reports of problems with the
> *.info file involving infinite loops of redirected links or something
> like that.
> 
> 	Ethan