Subject: Seeking areas of little or weak documentation
From: Steve Haflich
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:49:58 -0700
Stavros Macrakis <macrakis at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
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.
Perhaps one useful approach would be creation of a permuted index of the
functions. There may be software available on the web for creating a
permuted index, but if not, this is a problem that can be solved by
practice of that arcane skill known as "computer programming."
Years ago I wrote the permuted-index generator used for the Allegro CL
html documentation set. Perhaps I could shake it loose and make it open
source, but be aware that any permuted index generator needs lots of
twisty scrape-and-glue code to extract the names and locations out of
some preexisting documentation set.
But if this project makes sense and would be useful, then it could be
accomplished by someone knowing almost nothing about Maxima...