I wrote the info backend _days_ ago. About time the manpage stopped

[sgt/halibut] / doc / intro.but

\C{intro} Introduction to Halibut

Halibut is a multi-format documentation processing system.

What that means is that you write your document once, in Halibut's
input format, and then the Halibut program processes it into several
output formats which all contain the same text. So, for example, if
you want your application to have a Windows help file, and you also
want the same documentation available in HTML on your web site,
Halibut can do that for you.

\H{intro-formats} Output formats supported by Halibut

Currently Halibut supports the following output formats:

\b Plain ASCII text.

\b HTML.

\b Windows Help.

\b Unix \cw{man} page format.

\b GNU \c{info} format.

Several other formats have been planned (notably PostScript and
PDF), but the need for them has not yet been urgent.

\H{intro-features} Features supported by Halibut

Here's a list of Halibut's notable features.

\b Halibut automatically assigns sequential numbers to your
chapters, sections and subsections, and keeps track of them for you.
You supply a \e{keyword} for each section, and then you can generate
cross-references to that section using the keyword, and Halibut will
substitute the correct section number. Also, in any output format
where it makes sense, the cross-references will be hyperlinks to
that section of the document.

\b Halibut has some support for Unicode: you can include arbitrary
Unicode characters in your document, and specify fallback text in
case any output format doesn't support that character.

\b Halibut's indexing support is comprehensive and carefully
designed. It's easy to use in the simple case, but has powerful
features that should make it possible to maintain a high-quality and
useful index.