The Secret of RDoc HTML links.

Dave Howell <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.ruby.documentation
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Jul 24, 2006, at 16:16, Eric Hodel wrote:

>> [p.s. There's also the whole issue of SimpleMarkup's link markup, but 
>> that's for a different message...]
>
> RDoc just linkifies http://...
>
> See: http://rdoc.sourceforge.net/doc/files/README.html

Looks like the same readme that comes with RDoc itself. There's nothing 
whatsoever on that page about how to . . . what the heck?

Oh, that's really remarkable.


So, first, if one installs Ruby, RDoc pointedly installs absolutely no 
documentation about itself. Since getting RDoc to generate HTML 
documentation was nigh-impossible without instructions, I eventually 
convinced it that maybe documenting itself would be a good thing. I 
even suggested that it start its little section with the README file. 
Which it did. Because it's kind of important to me that I have 
documentation on my hard drive, linked together, ready to to go without 
the requirement of having a live net connection and putting up with the 
time delays inherent therein.

Except that my local RDoc-processed HTML version of the README 
conveniently stops right after "CREDITS". Thus eliminating all the 
documentation for "USAGE" and "MARKUP". The stuff that, oh, you know, 
explains how the heck markup's supposed to work.

It's the four hyphens that (according to the invisible documentation) 
are supposed to create a horizontal line. There's no error, it just 
stops processing everything below it. When I took out the hyphens, then 
it ran the whole file.

Well, mostly. To continue the mystery, I get the error "Unrecognized 
directive 'section' in README", and was getting that error even when it 
wasn't generating that section. (Altering the line that causes THAT 
error didn't help make the rest of the document appear, though).

And finally, although I have GREPped everything I can think of, I can 
find absolutely no reference in any of the generator files to 
Line::RULE. No "rule", no "line", no "<hr" command. Nothing in the 
templates or in html_generator that would appear to in any way 
translate from a Line::RULE structure into something that would create 
a horizontal line in HTML.

So the questions for THIS message are, were there known bugs in the 
RDoc released with Ruby 1.8.4? Does anybody have a valid HTML template 
that DOES provide control over horizontal lines? (There's an <hr... 
command in the version on rubyforge, for example, although it's also 
dated January 24, 2003.)
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