In article <3E3### [at] informatikuni-freiburgde> , Mark Weyer 
<wey### [at] informatikuni-freiburgde>  wrote:

> It may increase patience if somebody explained why
> this process is so time-consuming. I am beginning
> to suspect that HTML is the documentation's native
> format and that you have to do the conversion by
> hand.

The documentation that comes with POV-Ray as HTML is not the native format.
nevertheless, the native format is a special subset of HTML with a few
specific extensions that are then turned into HTML (I am not either going to
discuss nor justify this process in detail).  But this is not the reason why
the documentation isn't available in other formats yet.

> If, on the other hand, the documentation is also
> edited in the course of making it printable, then
> some people would be happy with an imperfect first
> approximation.

That is the whole point.  Getting the docs together and turning them into
some for of PDF or whatever is trivial, as others have demonstrated by doing
so.  However, that is far from a usable state as a book.  A good printable
version includes many things, ranging from high-resolution graphics and
formulas to images with colors suitable for printing (many images still have
black or other terrible background colors) to proper layout and formatting
in a book-style (no last lines on the top of a new page, for example) and
not to mention suitable table of contents and indices.

And in order to make it possible to get this done easily in a repeated
process as the documentation is updated, tools have to be configured,
written or modified to automate this process.  Doing this together with
POV-Ray 3.51 (which will include bugfixed docs as well) takes a lot of time.

And real-life is rather important these days; making a living in the current
economic climate simply has a much higher priority...

    Thorsten

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