A less presumptive .info? (was: Re: Playground pager lsp(1))

Arsen Arsenović
2023-04-05T21:20:14Z

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Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> Info files are formatted already, you cannot ask the reader to
> reformat them for a different line length.
>
> With man pages this is only possible if you never keep the formatted
> pages and reuse them once they were produced.

I've been casually wondering if creating a new format that can host more
formatting options and uses more precise syntax than 'plaintext with
some binary tags' would be a decent thing to work on.

My thoughts were brief and undeveloped as this was thought of on the
commute, but something that retains the binary offsets for indices and
tags, but stores formatted data (perhaps as s-exprs, those would be easy
to parse). It is always easier to remove information than to
reintroduce it.

Such a structure should resemble the input language, but with far less
complexity (e.g. something at the level of abstraction that HTML5 sits
at, so, macros would be expanded, and we'd be dealing with lists of
paragraphs and formatted blocks, etc.).

This would allow for the reflowing that was talked about in this thread,
and provide more readable output in graphical contexts, as it wouldn't
be data generated with the assumption of a monospace font (rather, the
format could store whether your context wants monospace or proportional
fonts at a given point), or data generated for a given screen size, or
with a given indentation size, or with the assumption of a lack of
features like italics, etc.

For instance, info2html used by the KDE info viewer currently produces
quite terrible results, because it fails to implement the heuristics the
Info viewers have properly. This problem would be hard to have with a
better "at-rest" format for Info pages.

The alternative is, of course, bringing HTML up to par feature-wise
(wrt. indices etc), but that'd be on the other end of the extreme, where
instead of being too easy to parse and lacking important information,
it'd be oververbose with and difficult to parse (not that such a thing
should not be done too, so that folks using ordinary browsers can enjoy
documentation, and so that projects can provide more accessible
documentation by the merit of more people having HTML than Info
viewers).

WDYT folks?
--
Arsen Arsenović

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