Re: [help-texinfo] Need Advice from Texinfo Experts

[Karl Berry]

Hi Tom,

    The docbook XML markup seems lots noisier to me than my limited look
    at Texinfo, and I think Texinfo would be easier to edit, maintain,
    and extend.

Very happy to hear it.  You won't be surprised to hear that I share your
opinion :).  Texinfo is not a standard with millions of dollars behind
it trying to conquer the world, it just works :).

    The current manual, after processing, results in about 30 pdf pages.
    It has a few tables and lists, 

Texinfo's table support is not wonderful, but it does have some.
(@table for description-list kinds of things, @multitable for real
multi-column tables).  Hopefully it'll be enough.  If you can give me a
url to the doc, I could take a look for anything that might be a snag.

Lists are no problem, there is the usual enumerated (@enumerate) and
bulleted (@itemize) lists.

    but no graphics yet.

When and if, Texinfo does have @image to support this.

    So I am thinking of converting the whole XML document source to Texinfo

Just so you know, Texinfo does have a docbook backend (makeinfo
--docbook), so after converting to Texinfo you could still get Docbook
output, if there are further post-processing tools for which that would
be useful.  Some recent work has been done on it, although there's
always more to do.  (I don't know docbook in much depth myself, almost
all the work has come from volunteers.)

    Niceville

What a name :).

Cheers,
Karl (principal Texinfo maintainer)