Am 15.08.2018 um 03:49 schrieb Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti:

On Tue, 14 Aug 2018, Henrique Andrade wrote:

Em 14 de agosto de 2018, Allin escreveu:

One possible idea would be to insist on markdown in gfn text help,
though I think markdown itself has problems in the line-length
department.

It's not a better/different idea, but I think Markdown is a great way
to write texts. I'm using a lot of it in my R scripts (via RMarkdown)
and I'm very satisfied with the results.

I like the markdown idea - although I didn't really know what it was it turns out I have been using parts of it by imitation already in the past.
Let me add to that that the Sourceforge trackers (bugs and feature requests in our case) also use markdown syntax, and there are guides available there.

I'm a bit wary of introducing mandatory rules for package writers; pdf documentation is probably too much.

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).

I agree. There should be incentives ("look at that pretty output, now look at the other ugly one") but an ugly plain text help should still be allowed.

One area where I think a mandatory rule doesn't hurt is for the zipped packages: Requiring a pdf help if you want to pack other resources (aux files) into your package. The majority of zip packages already has that. So this only affects Artur's threshold panel package and Jack's double hurdle package. (Anything else?)

cheers,
sven