[Nasm-devel] On the future of the NASM documentation

[H. P. A. <hp...@zy...>]

It is becoming pretty clear that maintaining our own typesetting system
for the documentation is getting increasingly ridiculous.  This is part
because Adobe is making the perhaps reasonable choice of not advancing
PostScript anymore and instead focusing on PDF ... but that also means
that the application rather than PostScript is responsible for layout.

I had to add support for OTF/TTF metrics to switch to better fonts, and
thoughts I'd add support for kerning at the same time, but quickly
learned that these days kerning has (reasonably) been merged into the
overall infrastructure for font shaping, which basically would imply
doing something with the equivalent complexity of Pango, and that is
just plain ridiculous.

Furthermore, the number of output formats that matter has dropped.  At
this point I believe the only ones that would realistically matter would
be (X)HTML Strict (so an external stylesheet can be applied) and PDF.
At the same time, TeX has grown up to support modern output formats
natively.

The NASM documentation is already written in a fairly TeX-like language,
and I'm genuinely wondering how hard it would be to convert it to LaTeX,
perhaps with extra macros.  That way we could use xelatex and htlatex to
produce PDF and HTML output, respectively.  Using xelatex rather than
the older pdflatex would among other things fully support Unicode.
Between texlive and MiKTeX these packages are readily available on all
the common desktop/development platforms.

Obviously we would have to make sure that the output not just looks
right but has the proper metadata, which would mean using a stylized
LaTeX, but that's not a problem -- it would still give us flexibility
far beyond what we currently get.

	-hpa