On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 22:03 -0500, Timothy Miller wrote: > > Nope. Latex is _not_ a documentation system. > > What you mean is texinfo and that's an abdomination > > that should have been never invented (sorry, personal opinion). > > I've never been able to figure out that stupid "info" replacement to > man pages.
Join the club. > And after studying HCI and cognitive engineering, I'm > getting progressively less tolerant of user interfaces whose controls > are not intuitive. Join² the club. > They thought Info was going to be an improvement, > but it's functionally a step backwards. I've never been able to > figure out how to reliably go "back" from a document I just took a > link to, nor can I figure out how to exit "help" back to whatever it > is that I was reading. And don't bother telling me. I don't care. Use pinfo. It looks and feels a lot like lynx so it's not great but at least it is usable (even though it might crash occasionally). I use it all the time to look things up in the gcc and gmake docs. The Gnome help browser also knows how to parse info files but pinfo is probably more handy. > It has all sorts of useless functions for moving to the next or a > previous word while managing to hide everything you need to navigate! A user interface written by people with Asperger's :( I was overjoyed when gcc got away from the FSF. Now if only they could kick Stallman off their steering committee... > and there are all sorts of bugs in them (at least in the Ubuntu > packages). Which ones? I don't recall seeing any ?! > I would really rather not burden a busy hardware engineer > with this. I like LaTeX. I do my homework in it, because I find it > easier to layout and edit a document with mathematical equations than > to write it by hand (legibly anyhow). I think LaTeX is awesome. It is. It definitely is. But the new Word 2007 also gives you that in a package that is far easier to learn so I'm afraid LaTeX is going to die :( New users will just use Word and only people who are set in their ways will continue using LaTeX (just like the ones that use *roff for anything but manpages). (I still think it's the right choice for this project! :) ) > But > it is by no means something I consider to be a required staple of > Computer Science (like C). It's close, though. At DIKU it was a damn good predictor of the quality of a report. If the student had written it in LaTeX, odds were that it was okay. If the student had written it in Word, odds were that it sucked. Recommended: o the semantics package -- it is written by two guys from DIKU who know their Haskell. Not useful for this project but might be useful for somebody. o XyPIC for laying things out in grids and for connecting them with various arrows. o graphviz -- for general graphs (of edges and nodes). You specify your graph and it will lay it out. o MetaPOST -- for graphs of functions and other kinds of precise drawing, specified textually without too much fuzz. -Peter _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
