Amethyst Revived
<i>This post was originally made by <b>skyjake</b> on the dengDevs blog. It was posted under the categories: Blog, Documentation, Platforms.</i>
While cleaning old stuff out of my projects folder I came across Amethyst, a document processor I wrote back in 2002. Although there are plenty of solutions for generating documentation (LaTeX, Docbook, groff, etc.) I felt they were too complex and/or user-hostile. Back then Amethyst was used for generating the various Doomsday readme files in plain text and HTML formats.
Amethyst has always been one of my favorite projects, so I decided to give it a refresh and spent some time porting it to Qt. It is now available as part of the <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/deng/">deng project on SourceForge</a>, albeit in a <a href="http://deng.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/deng/amethyst">separate Mercurial repository</a>. It is now licensed under GPL v3.
In the near future I plan to use Amethyst to generate revised Doomsday readme files and Unix manual pages. The idea of the readme is to be a user-friendly manual with a high-level overview of the most important engine functionality, with links to the wiki for more details. I think that this kind of a document is very important for summarizing the engine's capabilities for new (and current) users. The manual page will be quite similar, but with Unix platform specific notes.
While cleaning old stuff out of my projects folder I came across Amethyst, a document processor I wrote back in 2002. Although there are plenty of solutions for generating documentation (LaTeX, Docbook, groff, etc.) I felt they were too complex and/or user-hostile. Back then Amethyst was used for generating the various Doomsday readme files in plain text and HTML formats.
Amethyst has always been one of my favorite projects, so I decided to give it a refresh and spent some time porting it to Qt. It is now available as part of the <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/deng/">deng project on SourceForge</a>, albeit in a <a href="http://deng.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/deng/amethyst">separate Mercurial repository</a>. It is now licensed under GPL v3.
In the near future I plan to use Amethyst to generate revised Doomsday readme files and Unix manual pages. The idea of the readme is to be a user-friendly manual with a high-level overview of the most important engine functionality, with links to the wiki for more details. I think that this kind of a document is very important for summarizing the engine's capabilities for new (and current) users. The manual page will be quite similar, but with Unix platform specific notes.