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

[Luc H. <her...@fr...>]

Hello,

* On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 03:50:12PM -0800, Srinath Avadhanula <sr...@fa...> wrote:
> > 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...

The tool XT is available on: http://www.blnz.com/xt
For other tools, check the FAQ::Where To Start::Implementations.

I like the FAQ available on: http://www.dpawson.co.uk/
It is about XSLT and XSL:fo. It helped me a lot with typical xslt
constructs.

There is a reference documentation and some nice trivial examples (kind
of tutorial) on: http://www.zvon.org/
(and many, many other things)


> 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.

Hum. That is a very good question. I don't know. I'm also quite a newbye
in XML and XSLT. Checking on the FAQ ... yes! It is possible. The
solution seems quite complex, but it is possible (cf. FAQ::Plain Text
Outputs).


Personnally, I don't found XSLT as powerful as TeX is.
There are several things it can't do easilly or can't do at all --
that's were the FAQ is interresting.

BTW, there is an XML processor programmed in TeX by David Carlisle -- I
haven't tested it, but I think it worths mentionning it on this ML.

> What about generating a table of contentes automatically?

That is possible. Cf the FAQ again, and even the tutorials let us
imagine how to do it.


____
> > I use another way to produce html help file from vim help file. It
> > is based on awk scripts shipped with vim. It is not so bad.
> That sounds interesting too... Does that manage hyperlinking and color?

Hyperlinking yes, but colors no.
You should found the result of this convertion somewhere in my web site.
Probably on: http://hermitte.free.fr/vim/ressources/ VS_help.html
If not in vim/ressources/, it could be into vim/, or
vim/ressources/vimfiles/doc/.

> Another problem with the automated vim-html tools I've found so far is
> the indiscriminate cross-linking they do. For example, they link the has
> in a sentence "This package has the following features" to the
> has() function...

It also has this kind of problems. So, I avoid to use too generic tags
whenever I can.

-- 
Luc Hermitte
http://hermitte.free.fr/vim/