[issue16893] Generate Idle help from Doc/library/idle.rst

[Terry J. Reedy]

Terry J. Reedy added the comment:

In msg185726 Ned said "Ironically, the Tk text widget is perfectly capable of rendering richer text styles." He was and is correct.  Mark Roseman offered to take up the challenge.  In spite of my skepticism, he went ahead and built sphinxview around HTMLParser.  This reduced the core of the problem to "for each tag, content, and end tag, what state change or text insertion is needed. The result is simple enough for me to understand and even edit.

I sent Mark a detailed comparison of the Firefox rendering of idle.html and his tk rendering.  He replied with a new version whose output is essentially identical to Firefox's (minus links), including the green example box.  I intend to use a third version and will work on a full patch.

When running in a repository clone, Idle could access ../../Doc/build/html/library/idle.html.  But for installations, idle.html needs to be in idlelib.  I guess the only was to guarantee this everywhere (excepting overt downstream removals) is to commit it into the repository, unlike most other files built from .rst files). 

To help make sure this happens, I would like to add a comment at the top of idle.rst.  The devguide sentence on comments is unclear to me. Will the following work?
.. # After editing this, also build html, copy idle.html to idlelib,
   test, and upload or commit the html diff also.

It would be nice if the copy and commit process were added to the release process, but I will go ahead even without that.  A nicely rendered, slightly out-of-date .html will be a great improvement over the current situation.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue16893>
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