| 1 | \versionid $Id$ |
| 2 | |
| 3 | \C{intro} Introduction to Halibut |
| 4 | |
| 5 | Halibut is a multi-format documentation processing system. |
| 6 | |
| 7 | What that means is that you write your document once, in Halibut's |
| 8 | input format, and then the Halibut program processes it into several |
| 9 | output formats which all contain the same text. So, for example, if |
| 10 | you want your application to have a Windows help file, and you also |
| 11 | want the same documentation available in HTML on your web site, |
| 12 | Halibut can do that for you. |
| 13 | |
| 14 | \H{intro-formats} Output formats supported by Halibut |
| 15 | |
| 16 | Currently Halibut supports the following output formats: |
| 17 | |
| 18 | \b Plain ASCII text. |
| 19 | |
| 20 | \b HTML. |
| 21 | |
| 22 | \b Windows Help. |
| 23 | |
| 24 | \b Unix \cw{man} page format. |
| 25 | |
| 26 | \b GNU \c{info} format. |
| 27 | |
| 28 | \b PDF. |
| 29 | |
| 30 | \b PostScript. |
| 31 | |
| 32 | \H{intro-features} Features supported by Halibut |
| 33 | |
| 34 | Here's a list of Halibut's notable features. |
| 35 | |
| 36 | \b Halibut automatically assigns sequential numbers to your |
| 37 | chapters, sections and subsections, and keeps track of them for you. |
| 38 | You supply a \e{keyword} for each section, and then you can generate |
| 39 | cross-references to that section using the keyword, and Halibut will |
| 40 | substitute the correct section number. Also, in any output format |
| 41 | where it makes sense, the cross-references will be hyperlinks to |
| 42 | that section of the document. |
| 43 | |
| 44 | \b Halibut has some support for Unicode: you can include arbitrary |
| 45 | Unicode characters in your document, and specify fallback text in |
| 46 | case any output format doesn't support that character. |
| 47 | |
| 48 | \b Halibut's indexing support is comprehensive and carefully |
| 49 | designed. It's easy to use in the simple case, but has powerful |
| 50 | features that should make it possible to maintain a high-quality and |
| 51 | useful index. |