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From: John Turner <turner@xdiv.lanl.gov>
To: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: Re: XEmacs FAQ
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Reply-To: turner@lanl.gov

Soren Dayton writes:

 > but there is no nice mode for viewing dvi files in XEmacs.  On the other
 > hand texinfo is a defacto standard that is doing quite well.  It really
 > makes sense to me that you should be able to view the XEmacs FAQ inside
 > XEmacs.  It really seems to make sense to use the emacs documentation
 > system for this.  I really do fail to understand the arguments against
 > it.

I, too, like very much the ability to view documentation in [X]Emacs.
And I'm not going to argue too strenuously for a move to LaTeX and
LaTeX2HTML for XEmacs documentation, since maybe the current
limitations of Texinfo aren't enough to warrant it.  I just threw it
out as something to think about.  However, the limitations of Texinfo,
specifically

o the inability to do math, and
o the inability to include graphics

preclude it's use for my own documentation.  For software like XEmacs,
math probably isn't important, and although graphics would be nice,
it's not essential.  I'd certainly rather drop these than a nice TOC
and index.

Hrvoje Niksic writes:
 > Soren Dayton (csdayton@cs.uchicago.edu) wrote:
 > > but there is no nice mode for viewing dvi files in XEmacs.  On the other
 > > hand texinfo is a defacto standard that is doing quite well.  It really
 > > makes sense to me that you should be able to view the XEmacs FAQ inside
 > > XEmacs.  It really seems to make sense to use the emacs documentation
 > > system for this.  I really do fail to understand the arguments against
 > > it.
 > 
 > Agreed, completely.  Even viewing HTML is still relatively slow in
 > XEmacs.  Info works, and it works well.

Except for the limitations noted above.

Don't get me wrong.  I really really like Texinfo and info.  I have a
huge amount of stuff in my info tree and consult it regularly (most
often the gmake, gawk, and cvs manuals, probably).

Anyway...

--
John A. Turner         |"Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence;
Los Alamos Natl. Lab.  |  sound is that cup, but empty;
e-mail: turner@lanl.gov|    noise is that cup, but broken."
                       |                        - Robert Fripp

