The Reference Manual [Was Re: [Maxima] State of the Manual]

--- Richard Fateman <fateman@cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Just a thought:
> while you write the documentation, it
> may occur to you that what you are documenting
> is really so difficult to explain that
> (a) you'd like to leave it out.  (appropriate if
> it is useless and done by other commands better)
> (b) you'd like it to do something else (in which
> case it should be put on some "to do" list.)

One possible candidate I've got for that is plotting lists.
Does anyone know how that works?  The reference manual is
a bit confusing.

> Also, what is happening to the multiple manual
> idea  (user/reference/installation)?

As far as I know, not much yet.  The install I'm waiting on until the
new systems are in place and we know how to build on Windows.  The
reference manual hasn't be worked on, to my knowledge.  That'll be a
difficult task, and I'm reluctant to tackle it at the moment - the user
manual is more likely to be useful in the department of getting more
people using Maxima.  I concede that we will have to thoroughly scrub
and update the reference manual before 6.0.  That'll be a job, but in
some sense it might be easier than the manual, since everybody who's
interested can take a section and see what in there works, what
doesn't, what's confusing, etc.  Expanding it will be the tough part,
and we'll need to do some thinking about how to structure that before
6.0.  I have a few ideas, but that's for the future.

If there's anyone who wants to get started on cleaning up the old 
reference manual, you can pick a section and start systematically
checking it, and making notes on what needs to be addressed, expanded,
made clearer, corrected, etc.  No great skill is needed here, at least
for most of it, but it will take a basic familiarity with Maxima and a
LOT of patience.

CY

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