[Texmacs-dev] New official documentation in TeXmacs 1.0.0.20

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi *,

In TeXmacs 1.0.0.20 the new online documentation system
will become default (a copy will be included in the main distribution).
So from now on, it will become easier for anyone to contribute to
the documentation effort via CVS.

In particular, the following tasks remain to be done:

  * Adapt the existing TeXmacs tutorial pages to the new format,
    in a similar way as the two existing chapters.
    You may use centered tabulars for multiple screenshots.

  * Adapt the existing Spanish (and Romanian) documentation to
    the new format. This can be done by looking how the old documentation
    has been adapted and proceeding in the same way. This mainly consists of
      1) breaking the existing documentation into parts
      2) modernizing the references to menus and keyboard shortcuts
      3) translating a few new things.
    Almost all documentation should end up in texmacs-doc/main.

  * Adapt the TeXmacs web-site so as to let it become part of
    the TeXmacs documentation. Later on, this will allow us to write
    programs which automatically generate the web site from our
    documentation. If you want to help with this, please discuss
    an appropriate place where to put these pages.

    By the way, this will not be limited to the information contained
    in the current website. It will allow us to generate an Html website
    for all available documentation about TeXmacs :^)

    In fact, I notice that TeXmacs is as powerful (or even more powerful)
    as Zope in the sense that we may introduce any required markup for
    the automatic and dynamic generation of webpages.

  * Some documentation from the Wiki and other documentation by David
    should be adapted to the new format. If you are willing to do so,
    please contact me for an appropriate place where to put it.

Also:

  * If you want to insert a new branch or new files (which are not
    translations) into the CVS tree, then please contact me.
    Unfortunately, this is quite necessary, because CVS does not
    allow us to easily move files around.

  * Please feel free to make minor corrections in the English files
    whenever appropriate. For more important corrections, please contact me.

  * Notice that the "branch" macro will only take two arguments
    from TeXmacs 1.0.0.20 on. It is no longer needed to translate
    the middle argument with the short names for menus.

  * The automatic generation of indexes has not been addressed yet.
    Any good ideas on this topic are welcome. It would also be nice if
    someone is willing to program an automatic search engine.

  * On the long term, the documentation will become more and more dynamic.
    In fact, help files could become real programs and the separation
    between widgets and documentation is not that clear. At a first stage,
    the user preferences will be entered via the help browser.

Yours, Joris