Re: Transforming XML or other intermediate representation of Texinfo; category system

[Patrice Dumas]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2021 at 08:37:11PM -0800, Robert Dodier wrote:
> Hi Pat, thanks for your message.
> 
> It doesn't look like the --ifsomething / --no-ifsomething options will
> help. Essentially the problem is that the @ commands which are going
> to end up as HTML need to be kept, without actually processing them
> into HTML. The --ifhtml option wants to process them, but I want to
> postpone that until a later pass.

I must be missing something, as --if* do not process anything, but
rather select what will be processed.  The parser ignores the @if*
sections based on --if* but does not do any processing, it is the
converters that do the processing.  But if you do not want any
conversion nor tree transformations, it is very unclear to me what
you are using texi2any for...

Note that HTML output can be customized through use of perl files that
replace formatting functions used in the default caes.  But it is only
for HTML output and it works on the intermediate tree of perl
structures, so the @macro defined @-commands are already expanded for
instance.

> Likewise with recovering macros from XML, essentially what I need to
> do is generate some stuff (related to the categories referenced in the
> .texi files) and append that to the original .texi, and then process
> the whole thing with makeinfo --html. Ideally I'd like to tell
> makeinfo, "don't do anything, just give me a representation of the
> document for now." Is there a way to tell makeinfo to not expand
> macros?

No, for the reason I said before, without macros expansions, the tree
may not be well formed, so not suitable for the "classical" intermediate
tree of perl structures representation.

> It seems like Texinfo isn't a good fit for the stuff I'm trying to do,
> so I'll just leave the existing aggregation of scripts in place. But
> it has been fun to think about, and maybe I learned a little bit in
> the process.

I feel like I am still missing some basic understanding of what you are
trying to achieve, if it is easy for you to point me at the scripts you
use right now, maybe I could have a look.

-- 
Pat