Re: documentation: unreadable html tables

[Graham Percival]

The languages involved are perl, texinfo, and html.  In
particular, the documentation is written in texinfo; a perl script
(called texi2html) interprets the texinfo files, and outputs html.

The first step is to reproduce the problem in a small example.
Try making a tiny texinfo file, which contains the same kind of
table as in pitches.itely.  I think it's a @multitable, but I'm
not 100% certain.

Verify that running texi2html 1.82 on your tiny texinfo file
produces the bad output.  Then have a look at the output and see
what exactly you want to change -- is it just removing the <p>
tags?  Would it look better if there was some <table> attribute
being set?  etc.

Then you need to figure out how to get texi2html to produce the
output you want to see.  As it happens, texi2html is relatively
easy to extend (it's in perl, you can replace any of its built-in
fuctions easily, etc).  We *could* just add a special "overriding"
function to our texi2html init script, but in this case I'd
recommend getting your fix integrated into texi2html itself.  This
won't help us with 1.82, but when texi2html 1.84 comes out, it'll
have the fix.


I really hope that you'll take this up; we could really use
somebody who's familiar with texi2html.  We have a few problems
with our texi2html init scripts, and there's other parts of those
scripts that work well, but I think other texi2html users could
benefit from (like the sectioning-by-numbers), so it would be nice
if we could send a patch for this upstream.

If you're not familiar with perl... well, it's not as easy to
learn as python, but I'd still say that it's on the "easy" side of
programming languages.  It's much easier than scheme!  :)

Cheers,
- Graham

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 01:43:41PM -0700, -Eluze wrote:
> 
> no idea if i have enough skills in any of the languages involved (i do not
> even know which they are!)
> 
> but if you'd take the risk i would try! pls let me know how to proceed!
> 
> 
> 
> Graham Percival-3 wrote:
> > 
> > Unfortunately, I don't think anybody is available to look into
> > this.  If you could start working on a patch to fix this issue,
> > we'd be happy to help you work on this.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > - Graham
> > 
> > On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 02:49:54AM -0700, -Eluze wrote:
> >> 
> >> imo tables in the documentation are hardly readable because they
> >> 
> >>  - are wasting a lot of space so that you have to sroll around to try to
> >> get
> >> an overview of the table
> >>  - have no borders so that your eyes have to try to reconstruct columns
> >>  - have columns of different widths even if the contents are comparable
> >> 
> >> i am not sure if it is - partially - a problem of my browser (i am using
> >> opera) or if it could be improved by more appropriate settings or styles.
> >> 
> >> i had a short look at the source of the table 
> >> http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.13/Documentation/music-glossary/Pitch-names#Pitch-names
> >> pitch names  and noticed that <p> and </p> is placed around the content
> >> of
> >> each cell which might cause the waste of vertical space. this table has
> >> only
> >> 20 real rows (without the header) but needs scrolling over more than 2
> >> pages
> >> on my display.
> >> 
> >> it would be nice if such tables could be rendered in a more compact way -
> >> thanks!
> >> -- 
> >> View this message in context:
> >> http://www.nabble.com/documentation%3A-unreadable-html-tables-tp26037552p26037552.html
> >> Sent from the Gnu - Lilypond - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> >> 
> >> 
> >> 
> >> _______________________________________________
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> >> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
> > 
> > 
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> > 
> 
> -- 
> View this message in context: 
> http://www.nabble.com/documentation%3A-unreadable-html-tables-tp26037552p26042896.html
> Sent from the Gnu - Lilypond - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> 
> 
> 
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