Re: [AD] Allegro PDF documentation

[Grzegorz Adam Hankiewicz <gradha@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2004-01-01, tjaden@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> (Not that Allegro's DVI/PS/PDF output was very good, the last
> time I checked.)

It's crap. Not just the looks, but the fact that the resulting
file is 2MB. I've always hated the texinfo tools, they are so
limiting. They even have really strange bugs if you go out of the
ASCII realm. Maybe they have evolved from that, but they were one
of the reasons I stopped willing to translate Allegro to Spanish.
I prefer correct English documentation than handicapped Spanish one.

Anyway, the biggest problem is that we are going through several
layers to get the PDF output, one of them being texinfo. The output
could be improved very much if we could control it like the HTML
version. Does somebody know of a C library for PDF output? Or maybe
something else which allows easy PDF output?

I've used htmldoc previously to generate PDF from HTML pages,
but it's kind of limiting because it doesn't support CSS, which is
what I would prefer to reformat the text for printing. According
to their schedule they will have CSS for 1.9.x, which is going to
be released in 2003... He, maybe Allegro 5 can beat them.

Or try LaTeX output. I dislike their non ASCII hackish support, but
at least they are eager to hide it for the user most of the time. It
would certainly require more hacks for languages like Korean.

Docbook is... urg, xml. Weren't we willing to go xml for next
documentation version? Oh, shit.