Re: Some gardening

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Hi there!

Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Here's some more work for you Patrick, in case you get bored.
> (I guess I'll soon be removed from the list as a spammer/abuser if I
> continue writing mails such as this one :)

I do not think that will happen, but if you keep this up you might
find yourself being volunteered for various tasks :-)

> What do the others think about it?
> 
> # Source browser

I don't normally use this part of the garden, because grepping the
harddisk is a whole lot faster and gives more functionality, but
all your remarks sound nice to me. Not being the one that has to
do the programming, that's an easy thing to say :)

> # texshow-web
> 
> I've just noticed that there's no possibility to describe single
> options for the commands.
> Take \setuplayout for example. Describing such huge collection of
> parameters in plain text is not clear, synoptic any more. It would be
> great if there would be a possibility to add descriptions for:
> - the command as such (already there)
> - every pair of braces (only one for \setuplayout), has to be visible
> if it is optional or not

This is already there, but perhaps a bit too subtle: optional arguments
are typeset using darkred braces and brackets (instead of black)

> - every parameter inside a single brace
> - every single option for that parameter (for example: width=middle
> means that ...), default has to be marked

I believe that information is not in the XML file, but I guess it
should be. Would requires quite some a bit of effort on the data-
entry side (deriving the used defaults from the actual sources).

> Enabling the Wiki functionality (bold, italic, tables ... <texcode>
> and <context>) and linking it to the source browser (to the place
> where \def\thisspecificcommand is) would also add another
> dimensionality. It would probably not be 100% compatible with the
> pretty-much-textbased texshow program, but ... I could imagine that
> one day something similar as modules.pdf (texshow.pdf) could be made
> from that page with pretty good documentation of (all ?) ConTeXt
> commands.

standalone texshow is on the list to be re-done anyway, so I can
make it do whatever texshow-web does without much extra effort
(esp. since it will also become a ruby script).

> The ability to add commands is already there I think (I have never
> tried it out yet). What about adding commands for (official and
> third-party) modules? It should be separated from the main page, but
> still offering the same functionality.

This was on the todo list, IIRC. There is also metapost/metafun and
LaTeX commands to consider. :)

Taco