zic.8 in html

[Paul Eggert]

At Sun, 12 Oct 2003 22:42:37 +0200, Oscar van Vlijmen <ovv at hetnet.nl> writes:

> At this moment in time there are two viable options for producing
> documentation for other platforms than the TZ software is aimed at:
> - text only, iso-8859-1 encoding, file name ending in .txt
> - html 4.01, iso-8859-1 encoding, file name ending in .htm(l)

The automatic methods for generating HTML are somewhat buggy.
However, groff and troff do a passable job at generating plain text,
so I suppose it'd be reasonable to put them into the tz Makefile.
(ISO-8859-1 isn't universally recognized, though, particularly in the
Far East; we should stick with ASCII if we're not prepared to go with
UTF-8.)

Arthur, would it be reasonable to assume groff on the part of the
maintainers?  troff is less used these days.  We could distribute the
groff output, so people who download the files wouldn't need it.


>> I'd rather not maintain two forms of the documentation by hand.
> Why not? The files "Theory" and "zic.8" hardly ever change.

But they still change now and then.  They will change again once we
add support for 64-bit time_t, for example.  I'd rather not worry
about their going out-of-sync.