On Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 3:54 AM <arnold@skeeve.com> wrote:
It is like clockwork.

Whenever I say something about Texinfo *as a markup language* for use
in *writing books*, the discussion inevitably degenerates into a hate
rant against Info and RMS's (failed) attempt to replace man pages.
Totally missing the point too.

Yeah, that is a pain in the neck.

I had the other reaction to this...

I have been managing my web presence via DocBook SGML for a goodly long time.  It is, as mentioned upthread, pretty wordy what with all the verbose tagging.

It would be worth something to be able to edit it in TeXinfo form, with the lesser amount of tagging required.  (And I'd kinda like to get off of DocBook/SGML one of these days as the toolset is clearly mouldering away pretty badly.)

So my reaction to your comments was to look into the usability of TeXinfo...  I did a wee experiment yesterday, attempting to use docbook2x to get to something else.  Alas, it seems to want to use xsltproc on the XML form, and the transformation to XML is apparently a separate pain in the neck.  I thought I accomplished it, but the XSLT for generating TeXinfo throws up on it, so there must be more to the matter.  I'll take a further poke at it later; thank you for offering a bit of inspiration on possible approaches to change.

I know I can turn DocBook into s-expressions, and then write some transformation in CL after that; it would be nice if there were something already written.

For sophisticated material, TeXinfo is of use, notwithstanding notions to make everything into brief man pages.

Bashing RMS for wanting things from ITS (and probably Multics too) (as I see elsewhere in the thread) is unnecessarily unkind.  A dogmatic attitude of "must be short man pages" shifts us to a different Procrustean bed that fails in a different set of cases.  I for one was kinda hoping for Project Xanadu someday, to throw a different perspective on that.