dolfin team mailing list archive

[Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx>]

I met with Johan Hoffman in Stockholm yesterday and we decided it's
about time we put a manual together for DOLFIN. (And the code is now
mature enough that it will actually be possible to do it.) I will be
traveling this and the next week, but we could start thinking about
what we want to put into the manual.

First some random thoughts:

1. There is already a LaTeX-template in the source tree that I think
we should use.

2. Manual (PDF) is automatically updated on the web page from CVS once
a day.

3. We should probably also generate HTML from the PDF or directly from
tex. Is latex2html the right tool for this or are there any other
tools to consider?

4. Should we try to separate material between the FFC and DOLFIN
manuals or should they overlap? We could put each section in a
separate tex-file and use \input{} and let some sections be identical.

5. There should be an index at the end of the manual (see FFC manual
to see how to automatically build indices).

Suggestions for a table of contents:

1. Introduction
2. Quickstart with examples

Then go through the different building blocks one by one:

3. Linear algebra
4. Functions
5. Mesh
6. Input/output (pre and post processing)
7. Solving ordinary differential equations
8. Solving partial differential equations
9. Predefined modules/solvers

Appendix:

A. Installation (configure + make, dependencies, Debian package)
B. Developer guidelines (patches, coding standard etc)
C. Reference elements (copy from FFC manual)

I suggest we iterate this email on the list a couple of times until
convergence, then partition the work among us.

Any suggestions and feedback is welcome.

/Anders