Re: [avrdude-dev] avrdude documentation

[Brian Dean]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 08:29:49PM +0100, Joerg Wunsch wrote:

> Umm, i hope jade & Co will be available for Windows...  Poor Eric,
> yet another toolset to install. :-(  They are really huge,
> unfortunately, because it's just that, a complete SGML parser.

Well, we don't have to use it, and lack of tools on Windows is a good
enough reason for me not to.  It just seemed to produce the nicest
output.

Actually, my preference would be LaTeX - article format, then convert
the result to PDF using dvipdf.  This is what I do for my M128 manual
which you can take a look at, for example, here:

        http://www.bdmicro.com/m128b.pdf

To get LaTeX output to be readable for the on-line PDF, I had to
select a non-default font (some kind of Ariel variety), otherwise the
result looks chunky and not very good.  I see this with Rich Neswold's
PDF file as well, which is produced from Docbook.  I don't know how
easy or difficult it is to change fonts in Docbook, texinfo, etc.

While it's easy to go from LaTeX -> DVI -> PDF, I'm not sure if there
is a decent route to produce HTML from the LaTeX source.  But, is that
really important?  I think it would be sufficient to provide a PDF
manual to distribute with the code.  It's also easily viewable from
the web since most browsers are pre-configured to run a PDF viewer for
.pdf file types.

There should be a TeX/LaTeX package available for Windows, at least.

What do you guys think?  Source in LaTeX, but distribute PDF?  This
would be my preference.  I'll also volunteer to make the first version
of a manual, describing all the options, and configuration file, and
also do the required mark-up for the host-specific sections for
FreeBSD/Linux/Windows.  I'd need at least plain text for anything
specific to Linux/Windows, but I'd provide the markup to integrate it
into the LaTeX source.

-Brian
-- 
Brian Dean
address@hidden
http://www.bsdhome.com/
http://www.bdmicro.com/