Re: [seul-edu] Documentation? Was:Summing up our discussion so far

["Prevett, Larry" <Prevettl@cochise.cc.az.us>]

|  > I've looked at the writers guide and it scares me...
|  > Also it still discusses Docbook 3 (SGML) while we are well into Docbook
4
|  > (XML)?
|  >
|  It's been a while since anything has been done with it.  I keep telling
|  people that DocBook isn't as difficult as they seem to think (I've
|  written a DocBook document with no trouble using just a text editor),
|  but no one seems to buy that.

|  > What has been produced and what is it written "IN"?
|  >
|  Well, Larry Prevett is the only person who actually tried to write one
|  of our Guides, and I'm pretty sure he just ignored the DocBook stuff. 
|  Larry, what did you use?

Sorry,
just tuning in to all this, finals, grading papers (I'll do anything
to keep from having to grade papers.)

The 1st draft was written in H.T.M.L. using the "Ugly but Useful"
documentation standard.

The 13th draft (I didn't want to bother anyone with 2-12) should
be ready in Jan. I'm doing it in Latex and converting with Latex2html.
Latex and latex2html are absolutely fantastic for managing large
documents and converting to HTML, especially for math. You only need
to use a few tags for the Latex markup and all the links, images,   
everything happens automatically.

Here's a link to a web-based clustering presentation for the math
department I was fooling around with (to avoid grading papers.)

http://math.cochise.cc.az.us/math/cluster/

I was sort of hoping a miracle  would happen and someone would invent
a conversion tool for Latex to Docbook. Does anybody know of one yet?
If not, I'm looking forward to learning Docbook.

| Larry Prevett has been working on a Math Teacher's Guide
| (where are you on that, Larry?)

I've spent a year using the materials, creating some new materials,
and just basically living with it. There are some interesting things
I've discovered about using Linux for math applications here at the 
college and also in the high schools that I want to post eventually  
and share with everyone. I'm trying to incorporate those experiences 
into the guide also. One thing that I'm expecting is that this next  
version of the guide will splinter into several areas, and I'm trying
to organize things to make that easy to happen.

L. Prevett
Mathematics Instructor
Cochise College, Sierra Vista, AZ, US
prevettl@cochise.cc.az.us