Re: [MiNT] FreeMiNT documentation

[Norman Feske <nf2@inf.tu-dresden.de>]

Dear MiNT developers,

> before all "invent some sane format for the documentation". Then, when
> invented, we can revise all the existing documentation, because it will have
> to be converted anyways. "Revise" means re-use and update, not simply dump
> and write from scratch.

Once, I had the same problem. So I developed a tool, which I use now
for all my text-related work. It is called GOSH. It is a tcl-script,
which takes a plain ASCII text in usenet-style and generates either
Latex (and thus, ps or pdf), html, xml or man-pages. It supports
multiple section levels, nested items, nested enumerations, detection
of hex numbers, accentuations such as _this_ or *that*, tables,
cross-references, links, description-items, verbatim sections (for
source code) etc.

For example, I wrote my ACP-article about my MiNT-work using this
tool. You can take a look at the source code:

http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~nf2/svn/trunk/acp/doc/mcf5407eval.txt

Simple, isnt it?
As a result, you get something like:

http://acp.atari.org/files/articles/mcf5407eval.pdf

or

http://acp.atari.org/articles/mcf5407eval/mcf5407eval.html

or even

http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~nf2/tudos/html/goshtest.html

It is very extensible - a new backend can be added easily
(the html-backend took me an hour or so). ST-Guide, UDO?
Its biggest advantage is, that the source code is a
readable ASCII text. There is no markup-stuff or such.

As I said, I use this tool for everything: documentation,
websites, papers etc. Maybe it could be also of use for
the MiNT documentation work? If so - I would release it as
GPL.

Greetings,
Norman