A start on the User Manual; appearance; other opinions

--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I think that appearance is important.  The
> mathematica books and on-line material look
> good to me.  I suspect TeX / PDF /Display
> PostScript is what was used.
> 
> TeXmacs or LyX
> or even emacs --- any program not commercially supported
> which requires SEPARATE installation from
> Maxima to be used -- should be used with
> great caution.  Anything that does not
> run well on Windows -- like it or not, the most
> common operating system --  can't be considered
> seriously.

I'm not sure what we are arguing about here - are we talking about what
format to write the documentation in, or what forms we should be able
to generate it in, or what form we want to use as the in-program viewer
for documentation?  

If we are talking about what the original documents are written in, you
can do LaTeX anywhere.  LyX actually will run on Windows, if you have
an X server, but I think for a number of reasons it will be better to
move to LaTeX in any case.  That's about as universal as you can get.

As for what types of documentation we can generate, I think we are
going to do as well with LaTeX as with any other option.  We get ps,
dvi and pdf, and I think we can also get html and txt.  

As far as inline viewing, that's probably something to save for when we
get to the reference manual, which will be the manual we want to access
directly from Maxima.  We will need txt display for the terminal
displays, and probably html and pdf as well for other applications.

In any case, I'd be even MORE wary of commerical programs than I would
of free ones.  Macsyma Inc. is an excellent case in point.  If the
commerical company dies, it takes it's product with it.  emacs,
TeXmacs, and Lyx will survive, even if they aren't popular - it will
always be possible to read their stuff one way or another.

> I'm OK with Acrobat Reader, though I agree
> it is possible to get into trouble if you
>   do not play the right games with fonts.

We can run trial viewings in a variety of platforms before we release
it.  Actually, now that you mention it, did anyone have trouble with
the pdf document I put up earlier?
 
> The appearance of html is often unpredictable
> and often poor unless you make bitmaps. It is
> also very bulky for what you actually encode.

It has the advantage of being truly universal, though, or at least as
much so as any of the browser formats.  The only hope currently for a
truly standard web math is mathml, which isn't even close to being
properly implimented except maybe in mozilla.  It's also bulky, so
right now at least we are stuck with html.

> There are some fancy display programs like Livemath
> and tech explorer (a plug-in from IBM), but they
> require separate downloads.

If we are worrying about display programs vanishing with time, I
definitely wouldn't use anything like that.



__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals.
http://personals.yahoo.com