Re: Documentation

[Søren Hauberg]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> On 15-Jul-2005, Søren Hauberg wrote:
>
> | But it wouldn't be integrated with Octave, right? I wouldn't be able to 
> | do a "help -i my_function"? So if I create a new package the 
> | documentation that comes with the package wouldn't be integrated with 
> | Octave.
>
> Currently this is probably true because Octave only looks in one file
> when doing a help -i search.  But we can always fix Octave if it does
> not do the correct thing.
This was what I was trying to say in my original post, but since english 
isn't my first language, this message properly got lost in translation.

A way to support this would be to generate an info file at startup (or 
the first time in the session help -i is called) that links to the 
installed info files. Packages would then need a way of telling Octave 
that they provide an info file.

Another way to support this would be if the user asks for "help -i 
some_function", where "some_function" lives in the directory DIR, let 
Octave check if an info file called DIR/doc.info (or something similar) 
exist. If it does, then Octave should use that file, if not Octave 
should the default info file.

> | I used the .texi files in doc/interpreter. I then used a combination of 
> | info2html and latex2html. The "see also"'s doesn't work at the moment, 
> | but it shouldn't be to hard.
>
> Please try using a current version of makeinfo to generate the HTML
> and then write a .css file that gives the appearance you want.  I
> think this has the potential for much better and more reliable results
> than any other kind of conversion because makeinfo should be able to
> correctly parse all the Texinfo markup.
I tried playing with makeinfo 4.7 (the latest is 4.8, I'll have a look 
at it later on). The problem is that I can't seem to make makeinfo 
generate math (either MathML of images). texi2html can call latex2html 
and have it generate images for math contents. So makeinfo isn't quite 
as good as texi2html. Since one should be able to generate MathML from 
TeX, I guess it shouldn't be to big a task to include MathML within the 
Octave manual (wrapped in @ifhtml).


> jwe
/Søren