I liked the format of troubleshooting checklists found in an old Alcatel manual. Recently I needed to build a checklist of my own, so I decided to write this program to recreate Alcaltel's format.
Checklist steps are entered as "[field]: [text]" lines. Recognized fields are name (the name of
this step),
text (body of the step), q (the "question" asked at this step, if any),
yes (the next step or the path to follow if yes),
no (the path to follow if no, where applicable). While this program does not directly support
multi-paragraph steps or images, you could get creative with LaTeX output.
Steps are separated by a blank link. Successive blank lines are ignored. Commments beginning with
# are also ignored. If text is not defined then the
name is shown instead.
This program topologically sorts the checklist steps using a depth-first search. You don't have to supply a directed acyclic graph, but the topological ordering is meaningless if the steps form a cycle. Checklists with back-edges (such as "go back to step 1") do work, but their ordering is not specified.
A title, author, and date can each be specified with the same syntax.
For example, a line title: This is a title is a valid input.
If more than one title, author, or date is specified then the last declaration will win.
These commands are only used when generating LaTeX.