doc/plugins/contrib/texinfo.mdwn



[[I|tschwinge]] started writing a plugin to render Texinfo
inside the ikiwiki environment.
The plugin is available at http://www.schwinge.homeip.net/~thomas/tmp/texinfo.pm.
It's very basic at the moment, but will be improved over time.
Issues
N-to-M Mapping of Input and Output Files
Conventional ikiwiki [[htmlizeing|plugins/write#index6h3]] plugins
have a one-to-one mapping of input file and output file:
some/where/page.mdwn is rendered to some/where/page.html.
This can also be achieved for Texinfo files, but is somewhat
unusual there, when rendering them to HTML.  In general, there
is a N-to-M mapping:

N Texinfo input files (a main .texi file,
several helper files (fdl.texi, version.texi, ...), and
additional text files which are included from the main .texi
file, e.g. history.texi, libfoo.texi, libbar.texi.
M Texinfo output files: the main .texi file (which includes
the other input files) is usually rendered into a (flat) hierarchy
of HTML files, one file per node, see the table on
http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/#Top
for an example.

How to teach this to ikiwiki?
Copyright and Licensing Snippets
ikiwiki (obviously) doesn't understand (parse) the copyright and licensing
statements which are included in .texi files.
makeinfo Output
makeinfo --html is being used for rendering.  It creates stand-alone
HTML files, while ikiwiki only needs the files' <body>s.