Documentation project (was: Re: Top Ten Lists)

[Chris Pressey]

On 13 Apr 2003 16:44:39 +0200
Kent Boortz <kent@REDACTED> wrote:

> > On this subject - are the documentation HTML files generated from
> > some underlying format?  Or is it OK to submit patches on them
> > directly?
> 
> If you mean the normal Erlang documentation, it is written in
> SGML. Each image is in two formats, GIF and PostScript/EPS. From this
> we generate Unix manual pages, HTML and LaTeX. From LaTeX we generate
> PostScript/PDF.  The conversion tool is mainly written in Erlang. It
> uses nsgmls as a parser.  I know nsgmls can do XML (I don't know how
> well) so maybe it is not that hard to convert the tool to use XML as
> input instead of SGML.
> 
> The preparation for releasing the SGML tool as OpenSource is
> unfinished. I may be wrong but I think it is not that much left.
> A "we want that tool now please" may be enough to get it out
> the door ;-)
> 
> kent

I'm just thinking of the case where an open-source user notices an error
in the documentation, and wants to submit a correction.  The most
painless way to do this is to submit a patch against the doc source. 
But if they don't have access to the doc source, they can't do that.

So, I don't care as much about the SGML->HTML/man/PDF converter as the
SGML files themselves.  In fact, one could argue that, if they're not
publicly available, then the documentation isn't open-source.  (All the
user gets is the 'compiled' (HTML) version.)

(btw - there is a redundant link to otp_html_R9B-1.tar.gz on the
download page)

-Chris