Re: Displaying images for html output

[Christopher Dimech]

> Sent: Sunday, November 22, 2020 at 10:02 AM
> From: "Gavin Smith" <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>
> To: "Patrice Dumas" <pertusus@free.fr>, "Christopher Dimech" 
> <dimech@gmx.com>, "help-texinfo gnu" <help-texinfo@gnu.org>
> Subject: Re: Displaying images for html output
>
> On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 12:46:35AM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > I think that
> > the point is to copy the image file from where it is found to the
> > destination directory.
>
> Could this break the build systems of any existing manuals that use images?
> Are there any manuals that we could check?
>
> Also, what if the image files are out-of-date?
>
> I looked at the gendocs.sh script from gnulib, which would be one of
> the most usual ways for people to generate HTML manuals that they
> will upload to a website.  It does take care of copying images,
> copying them after running texi2any.  This should be harmless if it
> does it twice, just potentially slow if a manual has many images, but
> gendocs.sh could potentially be altered to check if the files already
> exist.
>
> It could be a benefit if texi2any does it instead of gendocs.sh, as there
> is this comment in gendocs.sh, at the copy_images function:
>
> # copy_images OUTDIR HTML-FILE...
> # -------------------------------
> # Copy all the images needed by the HTML-FILEs into OUTDIR.
> # Look for them in . and the -I directories; this is simpler than what
> # makeinfo supports with -I, but hopefully it will suffice.
>
> I'm thinking that Texinfo's manual needs some images in it, for the dual
> benefit of testing, and of showing people reading the Texinfo manual that
> images actually are supported.  Some ideas:
>
> These could be a proper diagrams, instead of ASCII art:
>
> https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Tree-Structuring.html#Tree-Structuring
>
> https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Heading-Format.html
>
> Does Anybody want to create this?  We'd need at least a .png version,
> and optionally a .eps version for dvi output.  It should be in black
> and white or at least look good in greyscale.
>
> Some manual-related humour, if we could get permission from the author
> (the non-commercial licence is no good):  https://xkcd.com/1343/
>
> Maybe some photographs of old (historically important?) manuals (for
> software or otherwise), or of somebody reading a book while fixing
> something, to show the human side and importance of good documentation,
> if anybody has an idea for something appropriate.  Perhaps with a
> caption like "systems are useless unless users understand how to
> use them".

I can do that.

Regards
Christopher