Re: Improving the documentation aesthetics

On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 07:49 +0100, Francis James Franklin wrote:
> One way might be to have a special image property giving a relative
> link to an image, and the XHTML exporter would use that link rather
> than export the embedded image. The actual images would therefore be
> saved separately in platform-specific directories and copied by the
> build script as appropriate.

This is on the right track I think, but in the past I've suggested, so
as to avoid modification to the xhtml exporter for the sole intended
purpose of our own docs, devolving the relative substitution to the
script, replacing the 'typical' (there is some degree of regulation doc
writers have to follow) link with the platform, and like you say
hardcoded not to embed. So the only difference essentially is that you
have the script do it, not the exporter. You can even have make-html do
what you'd want for the site, take the UA string (a dozen lines of php
in a file in abiword-docs) for $platform, and then if the docs are being
built for a package, the build or package script (either can do) calling
it replaces $platform with $feImBuildingFor, and removes the others (on
an individual basis, so as to account for platform disparity, which is
inevitable in cyclic development with a disparit number of developers
frontends other than any given frontend except unix).

> One concern I have is that there will always be some inconsistencies
> between the platforms and we need a system that can cope with these
> exceptions.

Er, right, see above. You've definitely got the right idea, my only
contention is that it might be better to devolve the exporter work to
the parse-and-polish script, and the script work Ryan speaks of to the
build-andor-package script.

Regards
-MG
Received on Mon Mar 28 09:07:39 2005