[LispM] Genera Documentation in Other Formats?

[Christopher Stacy]

On 6/18/17 1:47 AM, Steven Nunez wrote:
> I found this report from HP:
>
> http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/NSL-TN-12.pdf
>
> I *think* this is the same scribe. Anyone know if this might be a better option?

The Symbolics documentation was not in SCRIBE, but in a proprietary markup
language ("Sage") inspired by it.  If you have a full copy of Genera, 
then you
have the implementation of Sage, including its editor and viewer 
("Concordia").

On the one hand, you have a pretty simple Scheme program from ecraven
that was written to translate actual Sage binary (SAB) files into HTML.

This other option you suggest here is a program that translates some SCRIBE
documents ("with minimal modification" to their markup source) into HTML.
DEC went out of business long ago, and for a while apparently HP maintained
their public software archive (http://gatekeeper.dec.com), but that site 
is dead.
(The landing page is there, but all the archive toplevel links are 404.)
So I have no idea how that program was written, of if it even exists now.
Let alone what build and runtime environment might be needed.

It seems to me that if you're going to have to hack something, you ought to
start with the Scheme program.  Does it not actually already work?

With Genera at your disposal (as well as the translator's author!)
  it ought to be easy to figure out any issues with the translator.
The code looks like it handles cross references by turning them into HREFs.
The source code is only 2,000 lines long and looks easy to understand.

Scheme is available on all modern computers.  If for some reason you don't
like Scheme or proliferating language dependencies or something, you could
port the Scheme program into Common Lisp and run it both on Genera
or on any modern system with one of a dozen compilers such as SBCL.

You started off by suggesting that your ultimate target might be
some Microsoft-proprietary binary format based on HTML
I am boggled as to why that would be better than plain HTML
But aren't there HTML->CHTML converter programs?

If your ultimate target is PDF for some reason, I'm confused about
all the talk of HTML->PDF not preserving links.  PDF supports links,
and there seem to be zillions of programs that will do that conversion.

Furthermore, if you just boot Genera and go into the Document Examiner
(Concordia's viewer), you can do Hardcopy With Links, and the resulting
files will be rendered as hardcopy that can be read on the toilet.
Putting your finger on the paper page will automatically shuffle the pages.
This is documented in the paper "Lambda - The Ultimate Cross Reference".
OK, maybe I made this last part up.