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1 | \C{intro} Introduction to Halibut |
2 | |
3 | Halibut is a multi-format documentation processing system. |
4 | |
5 | What that means is that you write your document once, in Halibut's |
6 | input format, and then the Halibut program processes it into several |
7 | output formats which all contain the same text. So, for example, if |
8 | you want your application to have a Windows help file, and you also |
9 | want the same documentation available in HTML on your web site, |
10 | Halibut can do that for you. |
11 | |
12 | \H{intro-formats} Output formats supported by Halibut |
13 | |
14 | Currently Halibut supports the following output formats: |
15 | |
16 | \b Plain ASCII text. |
17 | |
18 | \b HTML. |
19 | |
20 | \b Windows Help. |
21 | |
22 | \b Unix man page format. |
23 | |
24 | Several other formats have been planned (notably PostScript, PDF and |
25 | Unix \c{info}), but the need for them has not yet been urgent. |
26 | |
27 | \H{intro-features} Features supported by Halibut |
28 | |
29 | Here's a list of Halibut's notable features. |
30 | |
31 | \b Halibut automatically assigns sequential numbers to your |
32 | chapters, sections and subsections, and keeps track of them for you. |
33 | You supply a \e{keyword} for each section, and then you can generate |
34 | cross-references to that section using the keyword, and Halibut will |
35 | substitute the correct section number. Also, in any output format |
36 | where it makes sense, the cross-references will be hyperlinks to |
37 | that section of the document. |
38 | |
39 | \b Halibut has some support for Unicode: you can include arbitrary |
40 | Unicode characters in your document, and specify fallback text in |
41 | case any output format doesn't support that character. |
42 | |
43 | \b Halibut's indexing support is comprehensive and carefully |
44 | designed. It's easy to use in the simple case, but has powerful |
45 | features that should make it possible to maintain a high-quality and |
46 | useful index. |