[DOC-SIG] Python Library Reference in new HTML form

[Laurence Tratt]

>> Um, it's Acorn RISC OS, and if you've actually heard of it, I'd be 
>> very impressed :) 
> Sure has.  Never seen one in real life, though (IIRC, the Acorn
> web browser is about the only one that can handle all flavours of
> the PNG image format, including all kinds of transparency).

Coo. I'm impressed :) And yes, I think you're right about the Acorn 
browser. It's still in beta at the moment, but it's coming along 
nicely. Andrew Hodgkinson and co. seem to be going pretty well on it 
at the moment. It is, in RISC OS terms, pretty memory hungry though, 
taking up nearly a megabyte even when it's not doing a great deal. Though 
that's insignificant when compared to, say, IE or Netscape :)

>> I did guess that even if this is of no obvious help, it might give 
>> the next HTML generation of documentation some good ideas. 
> FWIW, it looks like it would be very little work to adapt your stuff
> to Microsoft's new HTML Help utility (a nifty little utility which packs
> tons of HTML pages into a single archive, adds advanced indexing and
> free-text search facilities, etc).  Might give it a try later this week.

Feel free. If there's any changes that need to be done (and I can do 
them), don't hesitate to ask.

Once I've got a couple of things de-platform-specificed (is that a 
word?) from the source so to speak, I'll probably go ahead and
release it. It's not too large. The whole thing, including the HTML 
outputter and the StrongHelp outputter (which is the original one for 
Acorn machines) is just over 90Kb and it clocks in at around 3000 
lines. It's not a particuarly good example of exemplary programming 
practice, but that's because I thought initially I'd only do a small 
crude conversion, when what I wound up with was a very big, crude 
conversion. It's not so large that people shouldn't be able to find 
their way around it, if they need to.

>> Windows is horrendous with text that isn't relatively large, for example, 
>> because it doesn't antianialise text). 
> Footnote: it does, if you have the Plus! extensions and a 15-bit or better
> screen (the anti-aliaser can also be grabbed from microsoft.com). But I
> usually use the free Verdana font (designed for the screen by one of the
> world's leading typeface designers) -- it looks excellent at almost any size.

The last time I saw Plus, it could only anti-alias text that was 
*larger* than a certain size which rather defeats the point :) That 
might, however, have been an example of a dodgy machine setup. 
Believe me, once you're used to antianialised text everywhere (except 
in text editors... it looks out of place with monospaced fonts) it's 
hard to go over to non-anti anialised.


Laurie

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