Protovis documentation

[bzx]

hello

a question about documentation.
will it be somehow improved? I'm having hard time finding many things
that are relevant and not explained at all.. for instance, the first
example:

/* Y-axis and ticks. */
vis.add(pv.Rule)
.data(y.ticks(5))
.bottom(y)
.strokeStyle(function(d) d ? "#eee" : "#000")
.anchor("left").add(pv.Label)
.text(y.tickFormat);


where is .ticks() defined?
where is .tickFormat defined?

...just found it, it's for some reason defined in
pv.Scale.quantitative...
I completely do not understand it..

any advices appreciated.
thanks
bzx

[Jan van Gemert]

I've also recently just started Protovis, and i agree with you that
the documentation is a bit hard to read at times. There is jargon and
sometimes a bit of propaganda :). But, documentation of software is
always hard to keep up to date, and i prefer the developers focusing
on developing and bug-fixing then on documentation writing.
Also, they do document the source code, and they and other users give
excellent support in this forum.

As in your other post, i recommend this tutorial:
http://eagereyes.org/tutorials/protovis-primer-part-1
It is a very good introduction. I use the protovis documentation more
for reference.

Hope it helps you,
Jan

[Jamie Love]

In my (personal) opinion the protovis library is actually pretty good
for an open source system. I'm sure Mike would welcome improvements or
additional documentation of course.

One thing to note about the documentation - it provides API
documentation and some general documentation on marks, but to really
get to grips with it people tend to use the examples. In fact, I would
guess people rely on taking an example and adapting them to their
needs quite a bit.

Obviously this won't work for everyone, or every situation - and
tutorials on protovis would definitely add to the offering. Writing a
good book on this sort of topic is time intensive (I've toyed with the
idea myself).

Tutorials such as the one Jan references are great, and it's hopefully
only a matter of time before the protovis ecosystem gets large enough
to have enough bloggers that such tutorials become more prolific and
easier to find.

I'm not sure where you picked the example code from - but ticks and
tickFormat are defined here:
http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/jsdoc/symbols/pv.Scale.quantitative.html

Javascript allows some fairly fancy inheritance methods, and the what
the documentation is laid out doesn't abstract that much (it's
basically a leaky abstraction - it's kinda OO, but isn't).

What don't you understand about the documentation? I'd be happy to help.

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