I noticed today that there was a change in the ROOT User Guide page. The individual chapters are no longer available. I found this format helpful to use these chapters as reference. It is much harder to scroll through a very long document to find what one needs. Also the formatting of the new User Guide uses smaller font and is much harder to read in my opinion. The quality of the figures seems to also be lower than before. Is it possible to bring back the old User Guide page format with individually linked chapters? I found the older page much easier to use.
Did you notice that all section titles in the table of contents are links which take you to individual chapters immediately? I personally like having all in one document more because it makes full-text search much more useful (and it also allows to have meaningful -clickable- cross-references).
As for pictures I found the quality to be improved and updated compared the older version, and at least for me LaTeX is much more pleasant to look at that Word (though maybe the default text width is a little large for my European eyes). This is especially true for e.g. chapter 13 on math functions.
The user’s guide and primer have been rewritten completely in the MarkDown format.
daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
That’s the common source to generate LaTex, PDF, HTML, ePub formats.
They are all available on this page: root.cern.ch/drupal/content/users-guide
I agree that, in that move, we have lost the splitting of the PDF in individual files.
We can check if that can be done with mark down.
But:
- The font size is the same as before
- The figure are exactly the same file as before.
Very important: The math formulas are now rendered in a proper way. before they were simply crap !!!
With this new format we are now able to do the doc changes much easier. And we hope we will have a more up to date version of the manual. (the old one was completely out of date).
Looking again, you are right in that the font size seems the same and the figures are the same. I think the use of different font and margins gave me the perception of the text being smaller and the proportionally larger figures also made them look more pixelated.
It would be great to have the individual chapter pdf’s again. I usually had multiple chapters open as reference and it was very easy to access from the User Guide webpage and scroll through. (edit: thanks for looking into that.) I don’t know if anyone else has similar preferences.
Yes splitted chapters is something we would like too.
Hi Olivier,
having per-chapter documents isn’t hard, the problem is to ensure somehow that (now probably invalid) references to other chapters can still be interpreted by readers. I am attaching a patch for the software side (really a git patch, just has a silly extension because this board doesn’t allow *.patch attachments).
Separate-PDF-documents-for-user-s-guide-chapters.patch.C (1.09 KB)
Hello Benjamin,
Thanks for your input. Can you make the diff against the latest trunk ? the Makefile has been modified recently …
thanks
Olivier
well, … may be not needed … I see what you mean in the file you sent … I will take the idea… Thanks
at the same place you will find the user’s guide splitted in chapters in HMTL format
Wow, great! Thanks for making that happen. It’s much appreciated and hopefully it will be useful to other users as well 
.
Where are the MarkDown sources?
In the git repository, root 5.99 only.