Documentation

[Søren Hauberg]

Hi,
A thing that's always been bugging me, is that I can't add a new info 
file for the functions give people. That means all my documentation goes 
into the "help function_name" part of each function, which doesn't work 
very well when your documentation is long.

I've been thinking a bit about this today, since I think packages should 
be able to provide detailed documentation. So I suggest the following:

Extra documentation (in info, html, docbook, whatever) for functions in 
directory "DIR" into "DIR/doc/doc.FORMAT", where "FORMAT" is "info", 
"html", or whatever format the documentation uses.

For functions supplied with Octave the "DIR/doc/doc.info" could be a 
symlink to the info file currently being shipped with Octave.

This is not a perfect solution, since if the user is reading 
documentation for a 3rd party package, she will not be able to go 
directly to documentation for other packages or for the functions 
supplied with Octave (I'm assuming you can only open one .info at a time)

On the other hand, then this would be better than the current situation, 
and it would allow Octave to support different kinds of formats. (As you 
might be able to tell, I'm not that fond of the info format, as it isn't 
very good at displaying math).

This change should be fairly easy to implement, but should it be 
implemented?

/Søren

P.S. This is a little bit related, so I'll mention it here. I wanted to 
see how good html documentation could be auto-generated from the current 
documentation. I've put my first results online at 
http://hauberg.org/octavedoc/audio/doc.html
It's far from parfect, but I haven't spend much time looking at it.