Re: [boost] ATTENTION: Library requirements..

-----Original Message----- From: Boost [mailto:boost-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of Raffi Enficiaud Sent: 11 January 2016 08:49 To: boost@lists.boost.org Subject: Re: [boost] ATTENTION: Library requirements..

Le 11/01/16 04:03, Rene Rivera a écrit :

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Forgot to say..

On Sun, Jan 10, 2016 at 4:51 PM, Louis Dionne wrote:

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People can browse the documentation online, which does not require any additional setup. I would posit that 95% of new users use the online documentation, and they don't use the offline documentation anyways.

That rationale has made me angry more times than I can count. I do a lot of my Boost work offline. In particular on the train to/from my day job. Specifically I mostly do test results web site work with Google App Engine. And it's infuriating that Google decided that no one works or reads docs offline. Even when faced with the repeated bug reports and feature requests to provide offline docs for GAE (and they aren't alone in the web dev realm in this behavior). I had to resort to web scraping their doc web site (with limited success).

Just a data point though ;-)

I also agree that having offline doc is a important thing: I can add that the navigation is much faster as well, and we can just grep things...

I like the idea of Andrey Semashev: distributing a separate archive for documentation and reducing the size of the distributed archive. For the PDF, I do not know exactly the use case, but I can image having one single file containing everything is something that is useful.

I use the PDF version regularly when updating Boost.Math - mainly to find things that I know are there (because I wrote them!) but can't find where. It's the find/search power that is the killer application. (And it is portable of course). And all this discussion focussing on the *look* of documentation is ignoring our main weakness - how to FIND what you want to know??? Paul --- Paul A. Bristow Prizet Farmhouse Kendal UK LA8 8AB +44 (0) 1539 561830