[petsc-dev] User(s) manual sections field in manual pages?

[Smith, Barry F.]

> On Jun 12, 2019, at 4:08 AM, Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> (and another potential option is to use a tool to convert the current latex source or rendered pdf to HTML)

   Those tools are terrible, you get a big ugly mess. 

   Jed is the one with the big plans.

   Barry

> 
> Am Mi., 12. Juni 2019 um 09:40 Uhr schrieb Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com>:
> I'm interested to hear more about this plan to refactor the user's manual! In particular, is there a concensus on what's a good alternative to LaTeX?
> 
> I got to chat with one of the developers of deal.ii yesterday, which was cool - this is of course an example of high quality documentation, and uses Doxygen. We've also discussed Sphinx and Madoko in the past. It's also not out of the question to avoid heavy dependencies and consider something custom, akin to the current HTML generation approach for the man pages and other docs on the website. 
> 
> Am Sa., 8. Juni 2019 um 09:33 Uhr schrieb Smith, Barry F. <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov>:
> 
>   This was one of my many dreams. The sections in the users manual would have latex names and each man page would link to appropriate ones. Given the hopelessness of linking inside PDF documents on the web (in theory it is possible but no browsers support it) I gave up on it. You can remove these. With Jed's plans this summer to refactor the users manual to not use latex this all becomes possible but we'll want some automated way of doing this, not requiring listing links on each manual page.
> 
>    Barry
> 
> 
> > On Jun 8, 2019, at 1:09 AM, Mills, Richard Tran via petsc-dev <petsc-dev at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> > 
> > Colleagues,
> > 
> > I have noticed that we have a "Users manual sections" section in the MatNullSpaceCreate() manual page, and an empty "User manual sections" section (which I suppose should be corrected to "Users manual sections", since it is officially the "PETSc Users Manual"). Those appear to be the only two manual pages that use these headings. Would we like to add these for other manual pages, or, since they appear to be unused, should we eliminate them?
> > 
> > --Richard
>