Re: [Vim-latex-devel] Re: Whats the best way to write vim documentation?

[Benji F. <be...@me...>]

Srinath Avadhanula wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Jan 2003, Luc Hermitte wrote:
> 
> 
>>xml is not complicated at all.  There exists several interresting
>>tools that manipulate xml files under windows platform.  For instance,
>>XT can parse a xml data file and apply an xslt file on it to convert
>>the data into any desired format: xsl:fo (used to produced pdf), html,
>>latex, text, etc ; or even vim help file.  It you are interrested, I
>>can search through my bookmarks the links I got.
>>
> 
> 
> I am very interested... I didn't know much about xslt for instance. I
> was searching around on google today for xml and all I managed to get so
> far is a very very good introduction and no solid examples...
> 
> I did in fact search for xslt too and came across this:
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt
> 
> but I was just overwhelmed by the documentation... The problem I am
> facing is that I am completeley totally new to this, so I don't even
> know whats a good place to spend time at. For instance, should I spend
> time learning the xml.minidom package of python and write a custom
> xml->vimhelp converter (I don't have time for this right now...), or
> should I learn xslt and write a xslt stylesheet (am I using the right
> terminology?)
> 
> Also I would like to know for instance how much time I would have to
> spend writing a style sheet for xml-vimhelp. If it is a big enough
> project, it might be a good idea to float a project for it. I know quite
> a few people would benefit from such a tool...
> 
> Another question is how powerful something like xt is. Will it be able
> to generate vim help files which look somewhat like the present
> latex-suite.txt? Generating a vim help file is going to be tougher than
> generating an html file because in html we do not bother with paragraph
> width, indented paragraphs etc.
> 
> As a concrete example, will something like:

      I am willing to look into this.  It may take me a couple of weeks 
before I can get anywhere, though.  You may have noticed that I posted 
to the vim-dev list, in order to get a wider range of experience.  So 
far, the answers are not so encouraging as I had hoped.

      We can get vim2html and latex2html, but so far there seems to be 
no mechanism to generate both latex and vim from the same sources.  From 
what I have "heard," it seems that xml/xslt/DocBook is the way to go.  I 
think the xml2vim piece is the only one that needs to be made, and it 
will help us, the latex documentation project, and others.  So I 
volunteer to do it, with my usual caveat:  unless someone else beats me 
to it.

      In the mean time, I suggest writing documentation in whatever 
format seems easiest.  If you structure things as consistently as 
possible, it should not be hard (using the best text editor in the 
world) to convert to xml.

					--Benji