While researching the needs of the documentation build system I have come across some issue's that could well be resolved if we adopt some ground rules for abi documentation.
The purpose of the the doc build system (as I see it today) would be to build the HTML help system from native AbiWord doc's. This puts those documents in more of a SOURCE code role, than just a documentary role. To build the html documentation I need to be able to reliably retrieve three pieces of information from the "source abi docs. 1.) Link information (which docs links to which) 2.) Link Title information 3.) Authoring Information Currently I have a system working which ALMOST reliably gets #1. Almost is due to inconsistencies in the source abi docs... Seems that abi doesn't always create links in the same way. this can be viewed comparing the toplevel index.abw to the index.abw in the problems dir and also comparing those 2 files with the link in credits.abw (the link in credits.abw has a # symbol in it) (which is a bookmark right?) I currently have no method for retrieving either 2 or 3 but both should be easily retrievable... Some things thing that could automatically be created on the fly: Index pages (even the top!) hmtl footer's for each dir html headers for each dir I think that by combining two abi functions we could create a pretty nice (automatically generated) html help system where the documenters would only need to be concerned with their source documents not the html stuff... If we add 2 bookmarks in the source docs: #author #title I can use the text of these bookmarks to generate the html fields: <title> Copyright statement if we added: #description this text could be use to build the text of the index pages... Doing all of this would allow a documentor to... add a category by just adding a newcategory.abw to the toplevel dir ie. in en-US If required he could add a new dir under en-US for multilevel stuff like whats currently there... To conclude: The only real issues here are that we agree on a format for the bookmarks and that abi actually create the link without the # symbol so I can tell a link from a bookmark currently if you Insert>hyperlink>newlink.html[enter] Abi adds the link while giving you the error (DOC DOESN'T EXIST) but the link created is #newlink.html instead of: newlink.html (which may just mean I don't know how to do it right) The point is links don't contain # bookmarks do... Calvin Arndt __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Try FREE Yahoo! Mail - the world's greatest free email! http://mail.yahoo.com/
