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            <4A9CCC56.80001@morningstar2.co.uk> <4A9CF90D.5030100@elzevir.fr>
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Message-ID:  <39E0419A-5258-449B-8581-6880FEB3E177@gmail.com>
Date:         Wed, 2 Sep 2009 13:31:32 +0930
Reply-To: Mailing list for the LaTeX3 project
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From: Will Robertson <wspr81@GMAIL.COM>
Subject: Re: l3doc, was Re: xparse
To: LATEX-L@LISTSERV.UNI-HEIDELBERG.DE
In-Reply-To:  <4A9CF90D.5030100@elzevir.fr>
Precedence: list
Status: R

On 01/09/2009, at 8:05 PM, Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:

> As a matter of personnal feeling, I'm really tired of the dtx  
> format. If find it
> too complicated to write, read and modify. In general (for my normal  
> documents
> also) I prefer rather light markup and dtx format seems like the  
> opposite of
> light to me.
>
> I didn't have time to look too deeply in gmdoc, but I tend to think  
> it is a more
> usable approach.

I've written a couple of packages using gmdoc (pstool and asyfig, off  
the top of my head), and the feeling I get when opening up the source  
and seeing empty lines and no '%    \begin{macrocode}' is quite  
refreshing. The code is easier to come back to because there's a lot  
less visual cruft (which is easy enough to ignore while writing the  
code the first time).

> While discussing l3doc, I'd like to make a quite unrelated remark  
> (to which JF
> would most probably agree). It would be great to think that a  
> documentation is
> not necessarily just a PDF, but that some information may be  
> converted in other
> format and/or reused in applications

The only attempt at this so far have been to output a list of commands  
defined in the package, if desired, in an external file \jobname.cmds.

My feeling so far is that since we're writing free-form documentation  
in LaTeX plus the little structured pieces of information (e.g.,  
function names and a description of their arguments) it makes more  
sense to export the desired structured parts as the document is  
compiled.

But little has been in l3doc done along these lines, so far.

Will