RE: default help text

[Hall, Benjamin]

|-----Original Message-----
|From: John W. Eaton [mailto:address@hidden 
|Sent: Tuesday, February 10, 2009 10:05 PM
|To: Søren Hauberg
|Cc: address@hidden
|Subject: default help text
|
|On 10-Feb-2009, Søren Hauberg wrote:
|
|| tir, 10 02 2009 kl. 17:16 -0500, skrev John W. Eaton:
|| 
|| >   * I noticed that help function now prints a list of all functions
|| >     together instead of grouping them by directory.  Is that
|| >     intentional?  I thought the previous output format was more
|| >     helpful.  What do others think?
|| 
|| Hmm, I thought I actually fixed that, but apparently I didn't.
|| Personally, I would actually prefer neither of the two 
|options. I think
|| just typing 'help' provides waay too much output. I think it would be
|| better to simply print something like (very much written off 
|the top of
|| my head):
|| 
||   This is the GNU Octave prompt.
|| 
||   To run a script saved in the file 'myscript.m', type
|| 
||     myscript
|| 
||   and press ENTER.
|| 
||   To get help with individual commands and functions type
|| 
||     help name
|| 
||   where you should replace 'name' with the name of the command or
||   function you would like to learn more about.
|| 
||   For a more detailed introduction to GNU Octave, please consult the
||   manual. To read this from the prompt type
|| 
||     doc
|| 
||   Enjoy GNU Octave! If you have questions, feel free to join the GNU
||   Octave community. See http://www.octave.org for details.
|| 
|| Or something like that.
|
|I think this is worth changing, and your text is a good start.
|
|Does anyone else have comments about this?
|
|jwe
|

I like concise help text.  For me, I find the PDF version of the manual the 
most useful format for reading/learning new material (better than both the info 
reader and html format).  It would help me to have a pointer to the PDF version 
of the manual also indicated in this help string (even if it means a pointer to 
the web somewhere if we can't know where the PDF file ends up in different 
distributions).  For example

   For a more detailed introduction to GNU Octave, please consult the
   manual. To read this from the prompt type
 
     doc

   A PDF version of the Octave manual is distributed with Octave and
   also available at http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/docs.html

   Enjoy GNU Octave! ...

Of course, I realize that the PDF version of manual is *not* currently 
available at the location above.

Ben