Present docs as HTML.

[ElectricKeet]

Well-organized Markdown is great, especially for easy editing, but it's not especially convenient for the user to browse offline. HTML would be greatly preferable. As a big bonus, a well-styled online manual would be an excellent first impression for folks who hear about Furnace.

Trouble is, I have no idea where to get started implementing an automatic Markdown-to-HTML converter in the build process. I'd love to work with someone on this!

(Stretch goal: printable PDF. Would anyone use it, though?)

[tildearrow]

Yeah, but not sure whether to really consider this as an issue.

[Eknous-P]

I made a (manual) md to html converter. Hope this helps!
md2.html.zip

[ElectricKeet]

Thanks for the effort! I have plenty of ways to manually convert Markdown to HTML, though. I'm looking for a way to do this automatically as part of the Furnace build process.

It's either that, or do it all manually before each release.

[tildearrow]

Manual is not an option.

[ElectricKeet]

I didn't really want to have to do that either.

[yohannd1]

I did some tinkering with CMake and discovered a way to integrate it: add_custom_target with the converter program and then add_dependencies, linking it to the main binary (simple-program in the screenshot, but furnace on furnace).
The issue is: how to make the markdown->HTML converter multiplatform without depending on some scripting language such as Python? I think we'll need to get some markdown parser as a dependency and compile it on the fly.

[tildearrow]

Hmmm... I say not to take this approach.
I would prefer to have a script in scripts that runs at release time and automatically converts the Markdown docs to HTML (and possibly PDF).

[yohannd1]

I mean... that's the approach, isn't it? Except it runs automatically when you run make. Is that what you mean?