Richard Fateman writes:
> Here are my thoughts. Why not write it in Lisp, and make it possible for
> maxima users to add to the info, at least for their own new functions,
> interactively or via batch files. E.g. in a batch file,
> Describe(foobar): "piece of text or maybe xml or html ..."
> These could then be added to the hash table or search structure (which might
> be easier to read/write if it were a b-tree rather than hash table), and
> might also be good for partially-spelled items.
I'm not sure what such functionality is really important.
After all I user really wants to add new topics (how often this
may really happen) to Maxima documentation he can do this
by modifying documentation source and rebuilding it.
> For people using windows there is apparently a well-used "help" facility
> that might set a standard for data formats; perhaps our info could be dumped
> into that form and the help facilities could be used -- replacing our
> peculiarly formatted selection facility unnecessary.
We already have this. HTML produced from Maxima's texinfo
is one of well adopted documentation formats on Windows.
Please take a look at the help system of wxMaxima - it has
anything any Windows user may wish. The only one step
further is to convert plain HTML to more conveniet
so called "compressed html" .chm.
Best wishes,
Vadim
--
Vadim V. Zhytnikov
<vvzhy at mail.ru>
<vvzhy at netorn.ru>