[PYTHON DOC-SIG] Python TIM processor...

[Fred L. Drake]

Hey Bill!
  Have you had a chance to look at my patches for the ILU build
procedure?  I'd like to know if any problems turned up with them.

> 1)  Do these seem like reasonable resource constraints?

(from earlier in the post:)
> TIM->Postscript requires Python, TeX, GNU texindex & dvips
> TIM->HTML requires Python, Ghostscript & Perl

  texindex or makeindex?
  The requirement on ghostscript seems high, but I think I understand
what you're trying to do.  I'd be more tempted to write something like

     @picture base-file-name

and have the processor add the extension based on output format and
availability.  If the required image isn't available in the right
format, the conversion should be applied on an as-needed basis.  This
would allow the conversion policy used in the released version to be
highly flexible while still providing effection implementation of the
specific policy you describe.  For users who prefer to do images in
formats other than EPS, the option is fairly clean.  (Then do
conversions based on table lookup, with a configurable table... see
Grail: html2ps.py. ;-)

> 2)  Is there some Python script for turning texinfo into HTML, so that I
> could drop the Perl dependency?

  See texi2html.py in the Doc/ subdirectory of the Python
distribution.  This is the script used to produce HTML from a texinfo
file produced from the LaTeX document source.  It's not trivial
(nothing interesting is!), but does a farily reasonable job.  The
version packaged with Python 1.4 produces fairly tight HTML that seems
to work with the major browsers to which I have access (Grail, Mosaic,
Netscape).  I don't have a conveniently available Windows (or varient)
box, so I haven't checked with MSIE, but it doesn't do anything weird.
  If you have to hack on it to get it working for TIM (likely, to add
the flexibility you describe), we'd be interested in hearing from you.

> 3)  How should the various pathnames that have to be configured into the
> various scripts be configured in?

 Please elaborate....


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.
fdrake@cnri.reston.va.us
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
1895 Preston White Drive
Reston, VA    20191-5434

=================
DOC-SIG  - SIG for the Python Documentation Project

send messages to: doc-sig@python.org
administrivia to: doc-sig-request@python.org
=================