Re: Options and the manual

Den 04-01-2012 15:37, h.g. muller wrote:
>
>> -pieceToSquareTable is described in the manual, doesn't exist
>
> Oops! This is supposed to be -pieceToCharTable. Sometimes
> my engine-author hat gets the better of me... :-(
>
>> Many options are undocumented. I found these:
>
> Indeed, the docs are currently in a very sorry state. Worst thing
> is actually that there is no automatic conversion between XBoard
> and WinBoard docs, so that early everything has to be done in
> triplicate, as there are two incompatible help stadards for Windows,
> between which automatic conversion also seems impossible.
>
> So usually I only update the winboard.rtf file, which unfortunately
> onlycan be compiled to the obsolete help standard, which almost
> no one can read anymore.

Hmm, not good. I know next to nothing about help file formats and 
standards for MS Windows.

A possibility may be to use the texinfo format (.texi) also for 
Winboard. Makeinfo can make HTML output from .texi files, and that can 
be read by everyone.

I think you can have conditional sections, so you can use the same 
source for the xboard and winboard manuals. And as it is pure text, you 
can automatically extract information about e.g. options from the C 
source and insert it into the manuals. That would reduce much of the 
double work, but it of course takes some work to set up initially.