Re: documentation for MzScheme pre-releases

[rjs@isil.lloke.dna.fi (Riku Saikkonen)]

Alexey Mahotkin <alexm@jet.msk.su> writes:
[PLT Scheme documentation]
>I again suggest to publish LaTeX sources of above books via CVS :) Who
>knows maybe casual users like myself will ever submit patch or two to
>update the documentation...  :)

I'd like to second this. In addition to possible user patches, if you
suddenly stop development of PLT Scheme and someone else wants to
continue it, or someone wants to create a specialised version of it,
the result will be much better if it's easy to modify the (good!)
documentation. (As an ideological point of view, you might like to
read <URL:http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-doc.html>.)

A more practical matter: I've thought of converting the documentation
to TeXinfo format (to make browsing it more convenient in Emacs -
especially the searching and index features of Info documentation are
much better than with HTML or printed documentation [1]), probably
using some sort of quick-and-dirty script to do it automatically. But
I'd need the LaTeX sources of the document to do that conveniently
(and to see if it's feasible to do it automatically).

(I'm thinking of a script that would be generic enough that it would
likely be able to convert newer versions of the manual automatically,
provided that things don't change too much.)

It's also easy to create plaintext (and HTML) documentation from
TeXinfo, if there's a need for that. A recursive lynx -dump also
works, of course, but doesn't produce very good results because of the
headers and footers in each HTML page.

[1] Go to the name of a primitive or standard library procedure
    somewhere in your code and press C-h TAB to get the Info
    documentation for it. This works in C (using the GNU C library
    Info documentation) and many other languages, including R5RS
    Scheme (the newer Info versions of R5RS have a proper index) and
    the SLIB library.

    The "s" command in Info is also particularly useful: it searches
    through the text of the whole document.

-- 
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