Hello function-package writers, I've noticed recently that while the help text for some function packages looks fine, the help for some others looks like sh*t in what I regard as a reasonably wide help window. This seems to stem from some package writers resizing the help editing window to some "excessive" width -- so that people viewing the help in a narrower window see lots of (seemingly) arbitrarily broken lines. Some of you may have noticed that in CVS of a few weeks ago I placed a limit of 78 characters per line on package help text. Ignacio certainly noticed this, and pointed out that it was difficult to comply with the new restriction since the help text area in the function package window didn't give the user any idea of how wide the lines were, so one might have to go back and forth a number of times before managing to comply with the new limit. [Before proceeding, let me point out that there are good reasons for a line-length limit: see, for example, http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability ] I accept Ignacio's point, so in current git there's a new mechanism in place. To edit a package's plain-text help you now click the Edit button (lined up with "Help") in the package editor dialog. This gives you a text editor window which has the usual and expected text-editing controls (copy, paste, undo, redo, which were not available previously), and which has a fixed maximum width (which should roughly correspond to 78 characters). So (hopefully) now if you create excessively long lines you'll see the same broken mess that others will see when they try to read your help text in a text window 78 characters wide! Please, I don't mean for this to be adversarial (even if I phrased it a little sharply). We definitely value contributed function packages. We just want your work to be as easily usable as possible for as many gretl users as possible, and that requires that the help text be properly legible in a window of moderate width. Allin _______________________________________________ Gretl-devel mailing list Gretl-devel(a)lists.wfu.edu http://lists.wfu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gretl-devel

Dear Allin, > The new look of the package editor window is very nice: > edit facilities and auto-new-line. > Glad you like it! My question is about pdf > After the message "text help will be lost" > I feared to experiment further. > Does it mean I can make pdf everywhere I > wish: from latex or libre office odt and just load it from the > file-browser? > We need to find a way to make this more transparent, but here's how things stand at present: * Suppose you create a function package via the GUI and add help text using the text window supplied by gretl. Then when you save the package as a gfn file, the help text is embedded in the gfn. * If you decide to provide PDF help it is up to you to create a suitable PDF file (as you say, using LaTeX or libreoffice or whatever). This must have the same basename as the package (e.g. foo.pdf for a package named "foo"), and it should be placed in the same directory as the gfn file. Then when you upload the package (or build a zip file, under the "Save..." menu) gretl will create a zip file holding the gfn and the pdf. Also, in this case the embedded help text inside the gfn file is replaced by a reference to the pdf file, as in <help> pdfdoc:foo.pdf </help> This is the sense in which any pre-existing plain-text help is "lost": it's not stored inside the gfn any more. (But if you have the help text saved in a file of its own that won't be touched.)

On Thu, 8 Oct 2015, Henrique Andrade wrote: > What do you think about creating a LaTeX (or/and Word/Writer) template to > distribute to the authors to use when they prefer to write the help in pdf > format? Of course it would be based upon the official docs. Allin, if you > wish, I can help with this. Good idea. I've thought about that myself but haven't yet done anything. We already have the style file gretl.sty that's used for the gretl TeX documentation. It's oriented to the book document-class but could be adapted for the article class quite easily, I think.

My question is about pdf After the message "text help will be lost" I feared to experiment further.