[petsc-dev] links from manual pages to users manual

[Patrick Sanan]

> Am 25.05.2021 um 22:58 schrieb Barry Smith <bsmith at petsc.dev>:
> 
> 
>   Now that the users manual is html and we can properly link into it, it would be great to have links from the manual pages to appropriate locations in the users manual. For example SNESSetFunction.html would have a link to the generated Spinx location where SNESSetFunction is discussed.
> 
>   How do we go about doing this? 
> 
>   Not only is this useful for users but when developers are fixing/improving a manual page it would be nice if they had a way to jump directly to the appropriate place in the xxx.rst that that discusses the manual page to check that that material is also up-to-date and correct. So I guess we need a way to link to the correct place in the .rst and the generated .html
> 
This all depends on which approach we take to make the man pages better integrated. There are competing requirements so I think it'll have to be hashed out to find the correct compromise

- we need to leave things for Sowing to generate Fortran stubs
- we want to be able to write the man pages as .rst, like the rest of the Sphinx docs
- we want the man pages inline with the source
- we don't want to have to manually update all the man pages
- we want to avoid introducing brittle scripting, if possible

> 
>   Thanks
> 
>    Barry
> 
> In the old users manual I had it rigged to have a link to the manual page for every occurrence of a word that had a manual page in the users manual. Is that feature lost now? Is there anyway to bring it back?
> 
> 

This is lost, I think. What sorts of words were these? Once we have links from the man pages to the manual, as above, would it be just as good to directly link to sections of the manual?