[Texmacs-dev] Re: TeXmacs Powered CAS documentation

[Ayal Pinkus]

Hi Offray, Joris,


> > I want to make some contribution in this vacation to CAS comunity
> > (specially using TeXmacs, the CAS glue ;-) ). I can help also with
> > localization to spanish for some doc, and I offered before to try to
> > make another Scheme interpreter work with TeXmacs, but I feel that the
> > TeXmacs powered doc can help to more people and is more suited to me.
> > Any advice or indication about where to start will be apreciated.
>
> A first step would clearly be to provide help for CAS' where
> no online help is available yet (Yacas for instance).

It might be important to know that Yacas has its own mark-up
language in which we 'define' the documentation. If you look in
the manmake/ directory, in the *.txt files, you will see the 
documentation
right there. We then use a combination of Perl and some Yacas
scripts to convert to for instance: html, pdf and ps. The documentation
tools and the mark-up language are also documented. So if we can
find a mapping from our mark-up primitives to TeXMacs primitives
it should not be too hard to convert our documentation to TeXMacs
form.

Regarding internationalization; I know this is important for users
in countries like Germany, Spain, France... We need to think of
a way to completely translate the system and keep the translated
version up to date. Commercial CAS don't seem to be able to do
this, maybe we can ;-) The php team have a very nice scheme, where
people can collaborate to add documentation, but also to provide
translated versions of certain pages. This probably works well
with a project with many users, and with a web application that
supports this.


> Of course, all help from the maintainers of the different
> CAS systems would be very welcome too.

Unfortunately I have very little time to devote to Yacas currently,
so I must be careful where I spend it. But I'm always happy to
help...

Any way, Joris, at least I will see you at LSM next week ;-)
Back to preparing my talk.

Best wishes,
Ayal