Re: new documentation format

[Morten Welinder <mwelinder gmail com>]

On 11/28/05, Nicholas Lamb <njl ecs soton ac uk> wrote:

> Is there any documentation on how to write function docs with the new
> format? Compared to what I've seen so far it needs at least:

The test case for the new docs has so far been fn-R.  We haven't sorted
about the example issues yet.

Just thinking about we might want to have something like:

   { GNM_FUNC_HELP_EXAMPLE_1, "GCD(10,15)" }

where Gnumeric would parse the string as a (C-locale) formula, compute
the result, and display the example.  The format to use to display the result
would simply been the automatically deduced format by auto-format.c,
falling back to "General".

That should be good enough for hundreds of functions.  It won't work for
INDEX and other range-type functions.  This might work:

   { GNM_FUNC_HELP_EXAMPLE_TABLE, "A1:42" }
   { GNM_FUNC_HELP_EXAMPLE_TABLE, "A2:-1.14" }
   { GNM_FUNC_HELP_EXAMPLE_TABLE, "A3:\"4\"" }
   { GNM_FUNC_HELP_EXAMPLE_TABLE, "A4:=SUM(A1:A3)" }
   { GNM_FUNC_HELP_EXAMPLE_TEXT, N_("Since SUM ignores string...")}

The help system would have to build a little workbook internally, but I don't
see any problems with that.

Note, that formulas and values about are not translated.  We might need the
occational translated string constant, though.

Comments?

Morten