[Axiom-developer] RE: [Texmacs-dev] Axiom and TeXmacs

[Joris van der Hoeven]

> > Also: how much documentation does already exist
> > in the pamphlet format?
> 
> We are only at the beginning of the project. Did
> you have in mind some other format?

I would advocate using the TeXmacs format in that case,
so that we won't have to write specialized converters,
and maintain them for every change in the format.

Operations on pamphlet documents like extraction of
the code or the documentation may be seen as particular
instances of operations on structured documents.
In other words, operations like "tangle" might be
written directly in scheme (so that they can be invoked
using a shell/scheme script).

Notice that we have started to adopt a similar strategy
for the online documentation of TeXmacs: documentation
is subdivided in small entities which can be treated
independently (maintainance, translations, etc.).
We next provide markup and programs to reconstitute
complete documentation (like a full manual) from these pages.

This process is still at a very early stage and we plan to improve it
slowly but steadily. In the future, we plan for instance to add better
tools for cross-citation, automatic searching, several possible views
of documentation, folding, etc. We also plan to enhance the tools for
writing documentation: specialized menus, collective authoring via
the web, and so on.