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• Chapter 1: Introduction to Halibut
  • 1.1 Output formats supported by Halibut
  • 1.2 Features supported by Halibut

Chapter 1: Introduction to Halibut

Halibut is a multi-format documentation processing system.

What that means is that you write your document once, in Halibut's input format, and then the Halibut program processes it into several output formats which all contain the same text. So, for example, if you want your application to have a Windows help file, and you also want the same documentation available in HTML on your web site, Halibut can do that for you.

1.1 Output formats supported by Halibut

Currently Halibut supports the following output formats:

• Plain ASCII text.
• HTML.
• Unix man page format.
• GNU Info format.
• PDF.
• PostScript.
• Old-style Windows Help (.HLP).

(By setting suitable options, the HTML output can also be made suitable for feeding to the newer-style Windows HTML Help compiler.)

1.2 Features supported by Halibut

Here's a list of Halibut's notable features.

• Halibut automatically assigns sequential numbers to your chapters, sections and subsections, and keeps track of them for you. You supply a keyword for each section, and then you can generate cross-references to that section using the keyword, and Halibut will substitute the correct section number. Also, in any output format where it makes sense, the cross-references will be hyperlinks to that section of the document.
• Halibut has some support for Unicode: you can include arbitrary Unicode characters in your document, and specify fallback text in case any output format doesn't support that character.
• Halibut's indexing support is comprehensive and carefully designed. It's easy to use in the simple case, but has powerful features that should make it possible to maintain a high-quality and useful index.