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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 \cw{man} page format.
  23
  24 \b GNU \c{info} format.
  25
  26 Several other formats have been planned (notably PostScript and
  27 PDF), but the need for them has not yet been urgent.
  28
  29 \H{intro-features} Features supported by Halibut
  30
  31 Here's a list of Halibut's notable features.
  32
  33 \b Halibut automatically assigns sequential numbers to your
  34 chapters, sections and subsections, and keeps track of them for you.
  35 You supply a \e{keyword} for each section, and then you can generate
  36 cross-references to that section using the keyword, and Halibut will
  37 substitute the correct section number. Also, in any output format
  38 where it makes sense, the cross-references will be hyperlinks to
  39 that section of the document.
  40
  41 \b Halibut has some support for Unicode: you can include arbitrary
  42 Unicode characters in your document, and specify fallback text in
  43 case any output format doesn't support that character.
  44
  45 \b Halibut's indexing support is comprehensive and carefully
  46 designed. It's easy to use in the simple case, but has powerful
  47 features that should make it possible to maintain a high-quality and
  48 useful index.