I just had a very worrisome message from John Thornton about the state
of the documentation, and would like to find out if anyone knows what is
going on?  Apparently, Kim Kirwan took upon himself the task of
revitalizing the whole documentation preparation system, but at least right
now the future docs are not in good shape.  I have identified 3 areas where
there are serious problems.

1.  Many places in the docs, latexmath is used to format special math 
symbols
and formulas (sqrt symbols and fractions, mostly).  These still work fine in
the PDF output, but in the HTML docs, depending on exact syntax, you either
get the LaTeX commands verbatim or nothing at all.

2.  The entire section on hardware interfaces that used to be in the 
Integrator's
Manual is missing from the PDF's, as far as I can tell, it appears 
nowhere in
any manual, although it SHOULD appear now in the HAL manual, I think,
based on the HTML version.

3.  This can probably be fixed easily, but there is a main HTML table of
contents, and then each major manual section has its own TOC.  The 
individual
TOC's apparently don't get updated by the build process, so a number of the
entries just go back to the linuxcnc.org home page.

Since the 2.5 release is (hopefully) close at hand, and since the 2.5 
manual set
and the development master docs are now on the documentation page, these
problems are now apparent to general users as well as the developers.  
Specifically,
I'm trying to fix a bunch of omissions and outright mistakes in my PPMC 
documentation,
and there is now no cogent version of that doc available at all!  The 
HTML have this
latexmath problem so all the formulas are missing.  And, there is NO PDF 
at all
being built from the ascii file.

Obviously, John Thornton has been aware of this for some time, but if 
other developers
are not aware of it, I just wanted to make sure everybody knows.  I hope 
something is
in the works to fix this, but if not, then maybe we need to start 
thinking of how to
solve it.

Jon

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