Re: Better documentation search

[Carnë Draug]

On 19 November 2013 04:50, John Swensen <address@hidden> wrote:
> [...]
> 1) Is there HTML documentation that is part of all the release packages? If
> would this be preferred over the OctaveForge documentation layout.

Each release is done with the entire manual in HTML. It also has
entries for each of the individual functions which actually just links
to the manual (every core function should have an entry in the
manual).

> 2) Is there a zipped up version of the OctaveForge documentation somewhere?

No. But you can easily generate it yourself with the generate_html package.

> I could use something like HTTrack to deep scrape the whole site, but if
> this is downloadable somewhere that would be better. Or, how is this
> generated?

There's a function in the generate_html that generates HTML pages for
each of the functions. It's up to the package maintainers to do this
for each release they prepare (I do it for Octave core). When the
release is done I upload the folder to the root of the Octave Forge
webserver. The rest is done by php scripts. Rather than scrape the
whole site, you can limit the search to the alphabetical list [1]. A
better way to do this, because errors in the help text sometimes mess
up that list, would be:

1) parse the list of packages[2] (and add octave core to the list)
2) for each package read the files
http://octave.sourceforge.net/PKG_NAME/function_names_X (the X at the
end are the letters of the alphabet) which list all functions
belonging to that package
3) get the HTML documentation from
http://octave.sourceforge.net/PKG_NAME/FUNCTION_NAME.html

I may have understood it wrong, but your suggestion is to have the
documentation for each function as HTML already distributed with
Octave to search faster? If that's the case, then:

* we have the documentation in Texinfo which can be used to generate
HTML documentation easily. And we have the lookfor function which
searches through all the documentation of all functions (even the
unreleased stuff and local to the user). Can we use this two?
* you can't do that for Octave Forge packages because they are
independent of Octave core releases.

Carnë

[1] http://octave.sourceforge.net/functions_by_alpha.php
[2] http://octave.sourceforge.net/packages.php