Thank you very much for the thorough explanation. It makes sense. I’ll be
sharing the cheat sheet with my coworkers. It sure is a good starting point.
Dex
> On Aug 17, 2021, at 9:40 PM, Jens Axel Søgaard <jensa...@soegaard.net> wrote:
>
>
>> Den tir. 17. aug. 2021 kl. 16.34 skrev Dexter Lagan <dexterla...@gmail.com>:
>
>> Hello there,
>>
>> I'm trying to teach one of my coworkers how to search for function names
>> in the Racket manual, and I'm having serious problems finding very simple
>> things, such as the function to display the file browser dialog (get-file).
>> I know most function names by heart but my coworker isn't that fortunate. I
>> see I'm not the only one, as per these Stack Overflow answers.
>>
>> Does anybody know why the search engine doesn't seem to index page
>> contents other than exact function names and titles?
>>
>> I understand search engines aren't trivial matters, but I'm thinking that
>> finding very basic Racket functions would be crucial for beginners. If
>> somebody could point me to the search engine repo, I'd love to have a look.
>
> Full text search is possible to add - but it would require some changes to
> the current setup.
>
> One goal of the documentation system is that you can use the documentation on
> your own computer without any internet access.
> When you enter a search term, a piece of JavaScript runs directly on your
> computer without any queries sent to a server.
> In order for this to work there needs to be a prebuilt index in which the
> search term an be looked up.
> This index is built by `raco setup`. For each function/macro definition in
> the documentation an entry is added to the index
> with associated information (which module is defined in etc.).
>
> If you use the search page at docs.racket-lang.org the index will be
> downloaded to your computer first.
> Currently the index (the file name is plt-index.js ) has a size around 12
> MB.
>
> If full text search is to be added the index would be considerably larger -
> which means the index can no longer
> be downloaded. The actual search then needs to take place on the web-server.
>
> Could a standard full text indexer be used? Maybe - but most likely it will
> be necessary to build a custom one.
> Standard indexers stem words ("apple" and "apples" are indexed as the same
> word). They also filter out
> punctuation such as - . ? / etc. This in turn makes it difficult to search
> for identifiers.
>
> The compromise today is that we have precise search among the identifiers and
> keywords marked as
> imported by the documentation writers. If full text search is needed, then
> Google is the place to look.
>
> Back in the day before the current documentation search - it was possible to
> make a custom Google
> backed search page that only indexed a certain set of sites. It worked
> "okay", but not great.
> The current system works much better.
>
> That said, I understand that the amount of documentation has grown to such a
> size, that it can
> be difficult for newcomers to navigate. Maybe "cheat sheets" such as
>
> https://docs.racket-lang.org/racket-cheat/index.html
>
> could be added to some sections in order to give an overview of what's
> available?
>
> /Jens Axel
>
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