state of TeX article (re: html manual)

[Allen B. Riddell]

This is a useful article (and associated discussion) about what one can
do to get TeX rendering on the web (in HTML).

What's new in TeX, part 2

- http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/662053/1729d17e91b68d47/
- Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10468755

The strategy of converting the PDF to HTML was mentioned favorably (using
https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX).

It would be great to have the manual in HTML so that (1) it would be
findable via search engines and (2) we could point people to specific
sections via section-specific links (hard to do with PDFs).

If I find time I'll give pdf2htmlEX a spin..

Best,

Allen

[Bob Carpenter]

I think the current plan is to make it all a wiki.

Andrew's taken the discussion of priors to a wiki, so
I'm not planning to update the manual again w.r.t. priors.

I'm planning to start putting knitr-based examples up
on web pages, so I think we'll be able to scrap most of
the examples in the user's guide.

For a while, it's likely to be totally chaotic, with
the "manual" spread out over the actual manual and some
scrappy collection of wikis.

- Bob

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[Dustin Tran]

i think pandoc has (albeit limited) support for converting latex to markdown. it’s sure to require a lot of manual effort regardless, and i’m happy to help migrate things from the manual in latex over several wiki pages. just point me a repo/link to paste things in the wiki.

dustin

[Bob Carpenter]

We tried pandoc ages ago and it crashed and burned badly. Very limited.

Let's get the format set up first. I'm bogged down with so many
things I don't have time to do it, but if someone else wants to
get the whole thing set up, including deciding where to host it so
it can be long-lived and editable by outsiders like a real Wiki,
please have at it (though also please report back for comments along
the way on formatting, organization, etc.)

- Bob

[Dustin Tran]

for the link, what about just hosting it as a subdomain wiki.mc-stan.org (or doc.mc-stan.org)?

i like how rust does stuff: https://www.rust-lang.org similarly, we can separate it into a “book” (https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/) which teaches the general workarounds. then we have more comprehensive documentation with a reference guide (https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/reference.html) and api docs (https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/)

the source for theirs is available on github. it’s not directly editable by users though. another good example is julia’s, which is easy to navigate and is editable from the github files: http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/

dustin

[Daniel Lee]

On Oct 29, 2015, at 2:34 PM, Dustin Tran <dustinv...@gmail.com> wrote:

for the link, what about just hosting it as a subdomain wiki.mc-stan.org (or doc.mc-stan.org)?

Where would we host it? As in, bandwidth and rendering the html?

I like the use of the doc subdomain. 

i like how rust does stuff: https://www.rust-lang.org similarly, we can separate it into a “book” (https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/) which teaches the general workarounds. then we have more comprehensive documentation with a reference guide (https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/reference.html) and api docs (https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/)

the source for theirs is available on github. it’s not directly editable by users though. another good example is julia’s, which is easy to navigate and is editable from the github files: http://docs.julialang.org/en/release-0.4/

I had trouble viewing the source, but I trust that it's out there. I was looking at gitbook for a while. That might be able to render math. GitHub doesn't render latex in their markdown, so I think that it's a non-starter until they do. 

[Bob Carpenter]

Whatever Rust renders is really unstable in Safari --- the scrolling
locks until scree resized, etc.

I don't think all this Javascript-heavy mobile-first stuff creates very
pleasant or robust web sites for computers.

But I understand we're going to need to compromise.

But we absolutely need to be able to render LaTeX using MathJax, I think,
as ugly as it is on output.

- Bob

[Andrew Gelman]

Yes, and once it’s all in better shape we might want to collect it back into more of a book form.

> On Oct 29, 2015, at 1:45 PM, Bob Carpenter <ca...@alias-i.com> wrote:
>