[help-texinfo] Re: Magnification, math images, and figures

[Karl Berry]

    It's just that Texinfo already does so much that
    such a package would have to duplicate.

I don't see a need to duplicate anything.  It just seems like the extra
files (and work :) could and should be done separately.

If you or anyone works on this and the changes to texinfo.tex can be
integrated reasonably, then I'd do that, of course.  For example,
perhaps there could/should be a command @largeprintbook{} to change the
parameters.  (Fonts are likely the most important thing, but spacing
parameters should also change.)

    I also think it would be nice to make the existing GNU manuals
    available in extra-large type.

Indeed.

    Texinfo is the only way I know of for making  TeX-like HTML code.  

I know of three principal systems for convert TeX/LaTeX/whatever (in
general) to HTML: tex4ht, latex2html, and tex2page.  They each have
their pros and cons.  None of them have anything to do with Texinfo, nor
does Texinfo use any of their code.  (It predates all of them by a good
many years, for one thing.) 

There are links for these at http://tug.org/interest.html (among
hundreds of others).

    I suppose for the moment I'll just have to be satisfied with
    generating the math images at large sizes for Texinfo's HTML output.

MathML is the "forward-looking" way to handle math.  There are plugins
for Mozilla and other nameless browsers to handle it, although output
(not to mention input) is less than wonderful.  tex4ht makes some
attempt to generate MathML, not sure about latex2html.

Another interesting project is a widget named GtkMathView
(http://helm.cs.unibo.it/mml-widget/) which applies exactly the TeX math
algorithms to rendering MathML, by Luca Padovani.

    Yes, I meant for using it in my own software, which is still monolingual.

Oh, I understand now.  Well, you can't avoid reading the documentation
then :), but here is the basic idea.  
1) download and install the latest gettext (0.14.4 right now).
2) In configure.ac, put:
  AM_GNU_GETTEXT_VERSION([0.14.4])
  AM_GNU_GETTEXT([external])
3) run gettextize in your package.
4) mark strings to be translated in your source with _, as in
     somefn (_("this is a string"));

There is a hello,world C++ example in the gettext source dist.

Happy translating,
Karl