David Thompson:
|The only reason I'm working so hard on this is that the documentation
|is really starting to fall behind some of the features. The internal
|documentation is just too hard to try and update by hand; whereas the
|html is quite easy.
I'm glad you're working on it. I personally refer to the PDFs right now,
so I'm wondering, is there a source format (SGML, etc.) that was used to
generate both the HTML and the PDF? Should there be?
I'm thinking not only of those that prefer PDF for on-line quick-ref, but
also those new users that prefer to learn from dead tree docs
(whip out those highlighters) who will want to "print the manual", complete
with a valid page number index.
Randy
I hope you noticed that the HTML is actually more up-to-date than the
PDFs which are basically just dumps to PDF of the last printed
editions.
On the plus side, the PDFs preserved some typographic stuff
(equations, syntax charts) that fell apart completely in HTML.
On the negative side, there are a few things completely missing or
rewritten to match 3.x features, and even a few 4.x features in the
HTML and not in the PDFs.
The overlap is probably 90% though, but I usually check the HTML
first, then the PDF if any of the typesetting looks hosed.
Anyway, all our praise to David for taking this on. It will be nice
to be able to "gloss" the Help in the future with examples, FAQs,
tricks, images(! what a concept! (:-) ), etc.
--
Chris Pelkie
Scientific Visualization Producer
618 Rhodes Hall Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
