Re: .tex .pdf backend for autogsdoc worth the trouble?

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Saturday, December 22, 2001, at 08:30 PM, Willem Rein Oudshoorn wrote:

> A time ago I wrote an .tex, .pdf backend for AutoDoc.
> Now that autogsdoc is around I might take a stab
> at porting this backend to autogsdoc.
>
> But I am a little confused.  I looked at it briefly,
> and there are two programs
>
> - autogsdoc, producing .gsdoc and .html from source
> - gsdoc, .html from .gsdoc.
>
> Now what is the status of gsdoc?  Is this the basis sequence?

To be obsoleted by autogsdoc ... it was written using libxml,
while autogsdoc uses the ObjC wrappers round libxml instead.
It was also my first attempt, and not a particularly good design,
so that's two reasons to get rid of gsdoc.

>         autogsdoc            handtune         gsdoc
> source -----------> .gsdoc  ---------> .gsdoc -----> .html

No...  it's

        autogsdoc          autogsdoc
source -----------> .gsdoc --------> .html

Currently autogsdoc uses the following classes -
AGSParser: to take source code and produce a propety list describing it.
AGSOutput: to take the property list and produce a gsdoc file.
AGSIndex: to take a gsdoc file and produce cross referencing information 
(uses GSXMLParser)
AGSHtml: to take a gsdoc file, and AGSIndex objects, and use them to 
produce html (uses GSXMLParser)

The idea was (eventually) to have different equivalents of the AGSHtml 
class to produce output in
different formats and perhaps even to build a structure into autogsdoc 
so that the output classes
could be loaded as bundles.

> Note on properties of the .tex backend of AutoDoc.
>
> - producing .tex files looking like the NextStep docs
> - producing from .tex the .pdf files, containing
>   links.
>
> external tools used:
>
>   tex  (plain)
>   dvipdfm
>
>
> Knowing this, is it worthwhile to add such an backend?

That could be really good.  I'd like to do backends as bundles.  
designing some way for
autogsdoc to locate/load the appropriate bundles and handle file 
dependencies to know
when to use each backend should be fairly simple.