Re: Kernel docs: muddying the waters a bit

[Hans Verkuil]

On 02/18/16 13:04, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> Em Thu, 18 Feb 2016 13:23:37 +0200
> Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@xxxxxxxxx> escreveu:
> 
>> On Thu, 18 Feb 2016, Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> For simple documents like the one produced by kernel-doc, I guess
>>> all markup languages would work equally.
>>>
>>> The problem is for complex documents like the media kAPI one, where
>>> the document was written to produce a book. So, it uses some complex
>>> features found at DocBook. One of such features we use extensively
>>> is the capability of having a table with per-line columns. This way,
>>> we can produce things like:
>>>
>>> V4L2_CID_COLOR_KILLER	boolean	Enable the color killer (i. e. force a black & white image in case of a weak video signal).
>>> V4L2_CID_COLORFX	enum	Selects a color effect. The following values are defined:
>>> 				V4L2_COLORFX_NONE 		Color effect is disabled.
>>> 				V4L2_COLORFX_ANTIQUE 		An aging (old photo) effect.
>>> 				V4L2_COLORFX_ART_FREEZE 	Frost color effect.
>>>
>>> In the above example, we have a main 3 columns table, and we embed
>>> a 2 columns table at the third field of V4L2_CID_COLORFX to represent
>>> possible values for this menu control.
>>>
>>> See https://linuxtv.org/downloads/v4l-dvb-apis/control.html for the
>>> complete output of it.
>>>
>>> This is used extensively inside the media DocBook, and properly
>>> supporting it is one of our major concerns.
>>>
>>> Are there any way to represent those things with the markup
>>> languages currently being analyzed?
>>>
>>> Converting those tables will likely require manual work, as I don't
>>> think automatic tools will properly handle it, specially since we
>>> use some DocBook macros to help creating such tables.  
>>
>> Since I've let myself be told that asciidoc handles tables better than
>> reStructuredText, I tested this a bit with the presumably inferior one.
>>
>> rst has two table types, simple tables and grid tables [1]. It seems
>> like grid tables can do pretty much anything, but they can be cumbersome
>> to work with. So I tried to check what can be done with simple tables.
>>
>> Here's a sample, converted using rst2html (Sphinx will be prettier, but
>> rst2html works for simple things like this):
>>
>> https://people.freedesktop.org/~jani/v4l-table-within-table.rst
>> https://people.freedesktop.org/~jani/v4l-table-within-table.html
> 
> Yes, this would work. Can we remove the border from the main table?
> I guess it would be nicer.
> 
>>
>> Rather than using nested tables, you might want to consider using
>> definition lists within tables:
>>
>> https://people.freedesktop.org/~jani/v4l-definition-list-within-table.rst
>> https://people.freedesktop.org/~jani/v4l-definition-list-within-table.html
>>
>> You be the judge, but I think this is workable.
> 
> It is workable, but I guess nested tables produced a better result.
> 
> I did myself a test with nested tables with asciidoc too:
> 
> https://mchehab.fedorapeople.org/media-kabi-docs-test/pandoc_asciidoc/table.html
> https://mchehab.fedorapeople.org/media-kabi-docs-test/pandoc_asciidoc/table.ascii
> 
> With looks very decent to me.

It does, except for the vertical alignment of the third column (at least when viewed
with google chrome).

	Hans

> 
> I had to manually add the nested table, as pandoc conversion sent the
> DocBook's nested table to /dev/null.
> 
> Thanks,
> Mauro
>