Re: Displaying images for html output

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sun, Nov 22, 2020 at 09:02:17AM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote:
> 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?

It could be possible to reach GNU maintainers for GNU manuals if needed
and also to post on gnu-system-discuss (though I am not 100% sure who 
reads this list).
 
> Also, what if the image files are out-of-date?

I think that we should not care about that case. As long as the file
exists, even if, for instance it is a broken link, we do nothing.

> 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.

Indeed.

> 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 think that this is indeed better if texi2any does it instead of an
emulation in gendocs.sh, less risks for confusion.

-- 
Pat