Changes to the User Manual

Over the last weeks there have been some changes related to the jpylyzer User Manual. Here’s a brief overview.

User Manual now part of website

The jpylyzer User Manual is now available online as part of this website. Check out the following link:

http://openplanets.github.io/jpylyzer/userManual.html

Source of User Manual now in Markdown

This is the first result of an effort to move jpylyzer’s documentation away from Microsoft Word: the source of the User Manual is now entirely written in Markdown Extra, with some MathML which is used for the equations. With the Pandoc tool the Markdown source can be exported to a wide variety of delivery formats.

Figures as SVG

In addition to this, the figures in the User Manual are now all available as editable Scalable Vector Graphics files. These can be found (alongside the Markdown source) in the Github repo:

https://github.com/openplanets/jpylyzer/tree/master/doc

These changes remove any dependencies on proprietary formats and tools. Hopefully this will make it easier for people to contribute to jpylyzer and its documentation.

Status of PDF

The status of the PDF version of the Manual is a bit unclear at this stage: a first test at updating the PDF from the Markdown source resulted in some issues (the main problem is that some of the tables are not properly fitted to the page), and I’m still looking for a solution for that. Perhaps more importantly, I’m not sure if there’s real need for a PDF version anymore. For now I’ll leave the old PDF (which is based on the Word document) online. Needless to say this is only a temporary solution (the Word document will eventually be removed from the repo altogether).