[Python-Dev] status of development documentation (original) (raw)

Phillip J. Eby pje at telecommunity.com
Wed Dec 21 22:00:07 CET 2005

At 03:16 PM 12/21/2005 -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:

Maybe it's just because I came in late on this thread, but what exactly is broken about the current LaTeX documentation?

As far as I can tell from his comments:

  1. Fredrik doesn't want to have to install a LaTeX toolchain in order to get an HTML version of the documentation

  2. Fredrik likes using whatever tools he has for editing HTML better than whatever he has for editing LaTeX

  3. Fredrik believes that more people would participate in updating Python documentation if it didn't require a LaTeX toolchain or LaTeX-friendly editor.

(Of course, these are equally arguments for using other formats besides HTML, especially formats that are closer to plain text.)

By the way, I'm not sure I see what the problem with authoring Python documentation with reST would be. I've written fairly sizable documents (at least the size of a large library reference chapter (section?)) with both the pythondoc toolchain and with reST. It seems to me that even the largest Python manual is composed of chunks that are that size or smaller, so I don't think I see what constructs would be missing.

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