Re: What about dynamic documentation?

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Hi Jérôme,

Before you go any further on this, please check out:

   http://texshow.contextgarden.net

The backbone of texshow-web is a set of XML files that
are already present in the distribution (look for cont-en.xml)

Cheers, Taco

Jérôme Laurens wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Is is extremely useful for a newbie as I am to have access to the 
> manuals electronically.
> You just open the pdf and search to obtain what you need.
> 
> In general, you end up with a command that you have to copy from the pdf 
> then paste to your source file.
> Another solution is to use the text editor completion feature, which is 
> available only once you know the correct command name, at least the 
> beginning...
> What I am missing is a button in the pdf itself that would automagically 
> insert the proper code in my source.
> 
> To be more concrete, here is what could be done (on Mac OS X at least).
> 
> 0 - Define a data model.
> 1 - For a reasonnable set of commands, define dedicated GUIs panels.
> 2 - Write a dedicated browser
> 
> As there is a huge amount of "reasonnable" TeX and ConTeXt commands, it 
> is -not- reasonnable to fine tune a dedicated GUI for each one.
> But with some perl I think it would be possible to turn for example the 
> Quick References Manuals into a set of xml files, each one dedicated to 
> its own command. If these files are just HTML forms (modulo the proper 
> style and automagic filter), we have the GUI for free using a web 
> browser. The communication between the browser and the text editor could 
> come from SUBMIT. At least a "copy/paste" phase would be enough.
> 
> I already have a custom web browser that can insert some text directly 
> in a text editor (iTeXMac) It is based on Mac OS X WebKit.
> Which means that I will incorporate this browser directly into iTM, but 
> this not the question so far.
> 
> All this makes points 1 and 2 above acceptable IMHO.
> The problems come from point 0.
> I think a good thing would be to create a subsection of the context 
> garden, or another wiki, gathering all the sources.
> The seed would come from the actual documentation with automagic scripts 
> and people would update at will.
> Then people would be able to work on a local version using a web sucker.
> We can imagine searching facilities as well
> 
> BTW, Sometimes it is necessary to have some output to understand the 
> real effect of a command. This should enter into consideration.
> 
> How does it sound?
> 
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