Introduction: How I got here

[Randall Sawyer]

I am a long-time Linux/GNU-Hurd user.

I write code primarily in C, C++, Perl, HTML and CSS.

I am willing to contribute.

You may consider my motivation as that of "cognitive accessibility".

If I were reading software documentation on hard bound books, then I 
would be the sort of researcher with lots of labeled bookmarks in the 
pages and lists of where to find the information I need taped to the wall.

For example:
In order to put the contents of HTML documentation originating from the 
gtk-doc format at my finger tips, I found it helpful to write a Perl 
script which locates and converts all of the gtk-doc HTML index.html 
files on my system and writes them into HTML files which contain a 
left-hand sidebar of table-of-contents, a right-hand scrollable iframe 
displaying content and a drop-down list of neighboring documentation in 
the top left corner of the page. I have found this reformatting to be 
indispensible to helping me to navigate documentation. In the spirit of 
generosity, I posted this script - named "gtk-doc-navigator.pl" - and a 
screen-shot on the now defunct site gtkforums.com. The script was 
downloaded nearly 250 the last time I checked.

I want to become more proficient with tools such as 'autoconf, 'make' 
and other GNU-oriented apps and libraries. In order to assist my 
learning, I want to be able to convert existing documentation as I did 
with gtk-doc-navigator.pl.

Because I find the HTML output of makeinfo to be rather clunky as a 
starting point - as compared to that of gtk-doc - I have decided to 
familiarize myself with Texinfo in consideration of writing my own 
texinfo parser and/or converter.

NOTE: I have a few points and questions regarding Texinfo. Instead of 
overwhelming and alienating readers of the mailing list, I have decided 
to break up what I have to say into a number of discrete postings.

NOTE: I have supplied myself with a large sample of existing texinfo 
files on which to experiemnt by writing a script which crawls the page 
https://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html for for links to pages with links 
to downloadable *.texi.gz bundles. That fetched 110 files.

NOTE: If you want a copy of 'gtk-doc-navigator.pl' for yourself to see, 
I will send it to you upon request. It is fast - less than 0.1sec sys 
time for 81 source directories on a 12-year-old single processor laptop. 
You will need to have the perl package HTML::TreeBuilder installed 
(https://metacpan.org/pod/HTML::TreeBuilder).