[Pythonmac-SIG] "Official" MacPython docs: HELP!!!!

[Corran Webster]

At 2:41 PM -0800 9/3/01, Chris Barker wrote:
>Gordon Worley wrote:
>
>>  Okay, documentation in the form of reference can be found at
>>  <http://www.nevada.edu/~cwebster/Python/WWidgets/Wreference.html>.
>>  This is pretty good, but some of the stuff should be left out that
>>  doesn't seem to work, like movie.  I realize that this may be a lot
>>  for you to convert to LaTeX, but I don't have the time to learn it
>>  and convert HTML to it.  Sorry.
>
>I'll see what I can do. Was the doc originally written in HTML, or was
>it converted from something else that might be easier to deal with?
>Also, were you offering to trim out the stuff that doesn't seem to work.
>I really don't have time to test it all myself.

I originally wrote it in HTML - although I'm quite fluent in LaTeX I 
didn't have a platform where I could run LaTeX2html at the time that 
I wrote it.

The documentation was written by reading the source, rather than 
actually trying stuff, so I'm not entirely sure what does and doesn't 
work, unfortunately.  Let me know what's broken and I'll delete it, 
or at least make a note that it doesn't seem to be functional. The 
docs are also incomplete in the Reference section because I ran out 
of available time and I haven't had a chance to get back to it.  If 
anyone wants to fill in some blanks, I'll gladly incorporate them.

>  > Okay, I guess I will go learn some LaTeX,
>
>I personlly think LaTeX is wonderful, and the Python docs formats are a
>pretty nice way to construct Python docs. I will warn you , however,
>that the system is all set up to work well on a *nix system, and may
>take a little tweaking to get to work on the Mac.

Not much chance of getting it to work on clasic Mac OS as long as it 
relies on LaTeX2html (which it did when I was writing the W docs). 
LaTeX2html is a heavily Unix-dependent system - basically a bunch of 
TeX and image processing stuff glued together with Perl, as I 
understand.

It may work on OS X, however.

>  > Wait, now that I think about it, why not extend the W section a
>>  little and include a link to the above.  Okay, here's the plan:  I'll
>>  flesh out the W section to explain more about what it is and why
>>  someone might use it.  Then, I'll stick in the link and write "here's
>>  this nice link, use it if you actually want to do something with W.
>>  Have fun! :-)".
>
>That is a good option, particularly if I don't have time to do all that
>LaTeX conversion, so let's start with that.

I'm comfortable with that option.  Now that I have a moderately 
powerful Linux box available, I may get around to LaTeXifying it at 
some point, but probably not anytime this semester.

>  > To recap, here are the sections I'm working on to avoid duplication:
>>  Mac OS X, IDE mdoule browser, and W.  It's a small contribution, but
>>  every little bit helps.  :-)
>
>It certainly does. Anyone else?

The lack of mac documentation was why I originally wrote the W 
documentation.  I'd be willing to help, but it may be some time 
before I have large chunks of time to devote to the project.

Regards,
Corran