Seeking areas of little or weak documentation

Oh, I just *assumed* that whatever Sol came up with would be designed for
on-line use, not for paper.  Don't we all hate reading page-formatted PDFs
online?

               -s

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 16:44, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:

> I would hate to see YAMM (Yet Another Maxima Manual).  In this day & age,
> paper isn't where it's at; you want everything to on-line.
>
> It should be possible _within Maxima itself_ to bring up one or more web
> pages in your web browser which include function definitions, examples,
> source code, etc.  Javascript is sufficiently powerful to do a lot, and with
> HTML5 becoming available momentarily, a web-based interface will allow
> real-time hardware-accelerated shaded animated graphics from within Maxima.
>  The newest generation of browsers have just-in-time compilers for
> Javascript, so javascript is actually pretty zippy.  Check out Microsoft's
> beta browser, for example.
>
> If you want to look at better on-line documentation, look at the Javascript
> pages at
>
> http://www.w3schools.com/js/
>
> They aren't perfect, but they're pretty good, and they're Google
> searchable, which helps enormously.
>
> P.S., I would love to replace the existing Maxima front-end with a
> browser-based one, so that I could utilize some of the interactive
> javascript graphical tools -- e.g., JSXGraph.
>
> At 01:24 PM 3/21/2011, Stavros Macrakis wrote:
> >I think just about any topic in Maxima could benefit from intelligent
> documentation.
> >
> >Today, each section (e.g. polynomials) is organized alphabetically by
> function.  That is fine if you know what function you want, but very hard to
> use if you're trying to get something accomplished and don't know how.  The
> problem is that it's not clear what resources a tech writer could use to
> write this up in a goal-oriented way.  There is lots of useful information
> in the mailing list archives, but it is *a lot* of material.
> >
> >                -s
> >
> >On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 16:21, Michel Talon <talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr>
> wrote:
> >Sol Lederman wrote:
> >
> >> Henry and Richard,
> >>
> >> Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoroughly to my post.
> >>
> >> I see a common thread in your responses -- that there are areas of
> Maxima
> >> where information is not well organized/catalogued.
> >
> >One of the areas which would benefit from a better documentation is the
> part
> >36, Rules and patterns. This is a difficult subject, and frequently
> >questions about it appear in this forum. By collecting all this
> information,
> >and playing with the program, perhaps one could enhance this
> documentation.
> >This is a set of features which work very well in Mathematica and are very
> >well documented in the Mathematica book. This perhaps could help as
> example.
> >Robert Dodier is the expert on these features, he certainly could also
> help.
> >
> >In another department, R. Toy has recently added lbfgs to the share
> >directory. I suppose this is related to
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFGS_method
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-BFGS
> >but there is zero documentation. this would be a target for
> experimentation
> >and documentation on a limited domain.
> >
> >I would say the same for colnew but i am working on it, because i have
> >special interest on this program.
> >
> >There are other interesting programs which are presently broken such as
> >share/gentran. Dan Stanger is working on that, probably it will be an
> >interesting target of documentation  because gentran functionality is
> nice.
> >
> >--
> >Michel Talon
>
>