Suggestions:
The manual might start with:
Choose 1. Maxima is installed on my computer. How do I use it? Go to
chapter N
2. How do I get Maxima? Go to "Installation Guide"
3. What is Maxima anyway? Continue reading here..
Telling people (in the introduction) why free software is nice,
or the history of macsyma and its competition
seems like an unnecessary digression to me, at least at this point.
I would also hope that most people would not have to install
Maxima very often, so those instructions don't go in the
User Manual, but in the "Installation Guide".
Good start.
RJF
C Y wrote:
> OK, documentation heads! I've managed to make a complete mess and I
> figured I might as well post it to the web and let people comment.
> This thing is at the moment almost completely useless, but at least
> it's a start. Comments, suggestions, flames, etc. all welcome. This
> baby hasn't been really proofread, spellchecked, much of anything else
> - it's just hopefully a guide as to where to go. I only posted the
> postscript and PDF for the moment - if we decide this is a good
> starting point, I'll clean up the formatting, export it into a LaTeX
> document, fix a couple hacks I put in, etc. and maybe we can put it up
> on sourceforge and go to work. The postscript one is
> http://mathshield.sourceforge.net/maximadoc.ps and the PDF is
> http://mathshield.sourceforge.net/maximadoc.pdf The PDF is
> considerably smaller, so I'd recommend that, except that the pictures
> didn't make it so well into that one. The postscript has better ones,
> although even there there's room for improvement. (Eventually, once we
> get going on latex, we can use jpgs in the PDF document. I'm just to
> lazy to do it for such a useless document as this.)
>
> OK, let the games begin!
>
> CY
>
>
>
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