A start on the User Manual



>>>>> "CY" == C Y <smustudent1@yahoo.com> writes:

    CY> Umm...  I think you're confusing the user manual and the reference
    CY> manual.  What we are doing here is the user manual.  Reference will
    CY> come later, after we have more people who have read the user manual
    CY> :-).  At that point, we'll think about working with describe. 

Ok.  I hope the user and reference manual stay in sync then.
Hopefully the reference manual will be more up-to-date.

    >> I've not had very good luck with latex to html converters, and who
    >> wants to rewrite maxima's describe that's tightly coupled to texinfo
    >> to use something else?  

    CY> Not sure, since I have no idea how difficult that would be.  As for
    CY> html, what we can do is once we have a full, complete manual we can run
    CY> the converter and then fix it up by hand where we need to.  That will
    CY> be a bit of a pain, and I'd only want to do that when we are at the
    CY> stage of releasing a full manual.

I did this for the CMUCL User's manual.  It was originally in
latexinfo.  Converted it to latex, which was easy.  Getting latex2html
to convert the latex into html was a giant pain.  Taking several hours
to do the conversion didn't help either.  In fact, since that initial
effort, I have been unable to get latex2html to convert it again
since.  I have heard there are some errors in the latex source, but I
don't know where they are.

However, there are other converters (hevea) that seem to work better.
That's how the current CMUCL manual is done.

If HTML is important, it is important that NO manual twiddling is
needed.

Ray