mdw@git.distorted.org.uk Git - sgt/halibut/blob - doc/intro.but

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