Re: [Gretl-users] stylesheet for function package help
On Wed, 15 Aug 2018, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
I'm a bit wary of introducing mandatory rules for package
writers; pdf
documentation is probably too much.
OK, I agree.
On the other hand, markdown seems a viable solution. Basically, we
could say
that the help text can be a plain text file, but package authors are
encouraged to improve legibility via markdown (which should be rendered
graphically whenever possible).
Thinking about this some more, it's not totally straightforward. There
are tools to convert markdown to HTML OK, but we don't have a means of
displaying HTML inside gretl. The ideal, from the point of view of
flexibility of display, would be to have the help text as XML -- and
therefore subject to any XSL transformation we want -- but I'm not
proposing that, it would be too onerous.
Maybe we could make a little progress by producing some (short, clear)
guidelines on the formatting of plain text function help. For example,
it would help quite a lot if all paragraphs were separated by exactly
two newlines.
Allin