--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 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..
Good point, but I think normally those questions are posed in a README
file, not in the manual itself. The Chapter headings in the table of
contents (if properly named) should pretty much handle that
automatically as far as the Manual is concerned.
> 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.
Hmmm... Well, I suppose, but I thought it would be good to enable
people to make an informed choice about whether or not to use Maxima -
the kind of information I was hoping to compile in the overview at the
beginning is stuff I've spent quite a while looking for all over the
place on the web. Maybe the thing to do is put those sections at the
back - that way we will start out with the basics, but still have that
information present. Also, at least in my experience, people tend to
have the impression that anything free is something to avoid, because
it can't be any good, so I thought maybe we should address that point
up front.
> 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".
How about this, as a compromise: We could have various chapters
written in their own files, and then several master documents which
include selected chapters.
Install.tex
|
|
---- installchapter.tex
AllDocumentation.tex
|
|
---- basicschapter.tex
|
---- trigchapter.tex
|
....
|
---- installchapter.tex
|
---- othersystems.tex
|
---- history.tex
|
---- etc.
UsingMaxima.tex
|
|
---- basicschapter.tex
|
---- trigchapter.tex
|
---- etc.
Or something like that. That way, if someone only wanted the Install
stuff, they could just say latex Install.tex and have what they want.
If, they want everything, they could just say latex
Alldocumentation.tex, which I guess was what I started to write, and
have one book containing everything about Maxima (personally that's
what I would want.) We could decide as a group what we think would be
the best information to have in the User Manual, and just include those
chapters in UserManual.tex. The only requirement for this type of
setup, if I understand tex correctly, is that each chapter would have
to be in a different file, so we could use the \input command in the
master files.
> Good start.
Thanks.
> RJF
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