Benefits of using Sphinx documentation format

[Martin Liška]

On 7/13/21 1:52 PM, Eli Zaretskii via Gcc wrote:
>> From: Richard Biener <richard.guenther@gmail.com>
>> Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2021 08:24:17 +0200
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, "gcc@gcc.gnu.org" <gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
>>
>> I actually like texinfo (well, because I know it somewhat, compare to sphinx).
>> I think it produces quite decent PDF manuals.  I never use the html
>> output (in fact I read our manual using grep & vim in the original
>> .texi form ...).
> 
> FTR, I almost exclusively use the (Emacs) Info reader to read the
> manuals in Info format.  I never understood those who prefer reading
> HTML-formatted docs in a Web browser.

It's very easy. HTML output is much nice from the visual point of view and
everybody uses a browser nowadays. Moreover, one can easily Google for
e.g. option name, or provide a link at pages like StackOverflow.
That's reality.

> 
> So I never understood people, let alone developers, who are willing to
> throw such power out the window and use HTML.  I only do that when
> there's a manual I don't have installed in the Info format (a rare
> phenomenon) or some other similarly exceptional cases.  But I get it
> that there are strange people who prefer HTML nonetheless.  More
> importantly, the Texinfo developers understand that, and actively work
> towards making the Texinfo HTML better, with some impressive progress
> already there, see the latest release 6.8 of Texinfo (Gavin mentioned
> some of the advances).
> 

I've read that and yes, there's a progress. However, I still see a rapid gap
in what can be achieved by a mode modern tool like Sphinx.

Martin