Re: [Chicken-users] Manual update

[Peter Keller]

On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 08:08:21AM +0200, Sven Hartrumpf wrote:
> On 29 Aug 2002, Peter Keller <address@hidden> wrote: 
> > However, I still need to split up the gigantic manual.tex file into
> > smaller pieces that represent these sections.
> 
> Do we really want that?
> manual.tex is more like a medium-sized document in the TeX world.
> A one-file approach has many advantages:
> - easy global changes and consistency checks (terminology etc.)
> - easy to handle with modern hardware and editors (one big manual.tex
>   might have been a problem in the 80's :-) )
> - ...

Well, from a hardware point of view it doesn't make a difference,
but from the document structuring point of view it does since it makes
it difficult to restructure the document when it is in a big file. An
example: moving one chapter to in front of another chapter. You have
to find the boundaries in the editor and copy and paste everything and
hope you didn't muck it up. Moving one \input in front of another is a
lot less error prone... I predict that as tutorials and more examples get
written, having these things in seperate files will be an advantage.
In short, is all of your scheme in one big file? :)

I was going to break up the manual.tex into chapter files so there'd
be around 8 tex files, plus the main tex file that puts it all together
and a macros.tex file which defines helper/consistancy functions.

-pete