[Texmacs-dev] Re: TeXmacs Powered CAS documentation

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> >> I want to make some contribution in this vacation to CAS comunity
> >> (specially using TeXmacs, the CAS glue ;-) ). I can help also with
> >> localization to spanish for some doc, and I offered before to try to
> >> make another Scheme interpreter work with TeXmacs, but I feel that the
> >> TeXmacs powered doc can help to more people and is more suited to me.
> >> Any advice or indication about where to start will be apreciated.
> >
> > A first step would clearly be to provide help for CAS' where
> > no online help is available yet (Yacas for instance).
>
> It might be important to know that Yacas has its own mark-up
> language in which we 'define' the documentation. If you look in
> the manmake/ directory, in the *.txt files, you will see the
> documentation
> right there. We then use a combination of Perl and some Yacas
> scripts to convert to for instance: html, pdf and ps. The documentation
> tools and the mark-up language are also documented. So if we can
> find a mapping from our mark-up primitives to TeXMacs primitives
> it should not be too hard to convert our documentation to TeXMacs
> form.

This seems cool. Probably the best way to proceed would be
to export some modified kind of html, with tags for additional structure.

> Regarding internationalization; I know this is important for users
> in countries like Germany, Spain, France... We need to think of
> a way to completely translate the system and keep the translated
> version up to date. Commercial CAS don't seem to be able to do
> this, maybe we can ;-) The php team have a very nice scheme, where
> people can collaborate to add documentation, but also to provide
> translated versions of certain pages. This probably works well
> with a project with many users, and with a web application that
> supports this.

Please take a look at the texmacs-doc project on Savannah;
we actually already do have such a scheme :^)
In fact, Offray translated a big part of the TeXmacs
documentation into Spanish.

> > Of course, all help from the maintainers of the different
> > CAS systems would be very welcome too.
>
> Unfortunately I have very little time to devote to Yacas currently,
> so I must be careful where I spend it. But I'm always happy to
> help...
>
> Any way, Joris, at least I will see you at LSM next week ;-)
> Back to preparing my talk.

OK; see you this week.

Best wishes, Joris