Talk:Main page

From BRL-CAD
Revision as of 01:58, 14 November 2009 by Ssd (talk | contribs)

I've started having fun with BRL-CAD, but I notice that this wiki needs some TLC. I'm an old hand at mediawiki, so if nobody objects, I'm going to start making massive changes here. For starters, I can:

  • categorize every page, looks like there's quite a few untagged pages
  • relabel the stuff in Category:MGED to remove the prefix so it looks nicer (this is a huge job unless it gets automated)
  • Eventually, I'd like to make a page for (almost) every executable in brlcad/bin; some already have pdfs or pages and I'd start by finding and categorizing these.

If there's no objections, I'll get started when I have time. --Ssd 08:40, 12 November 2009 (EST)


Hi Ssd, no objections whatsoever! The wiki could absolutely use lots of TLC. Let me know if there are things I can do to help you out. If you're really up for a challenge, one of the things we were working on over a year ago (that never got off the ground) was a way to keep our Docbook XML sources fully synchronized with Mediawiki so you could perform bidirectional editing and have changes to one update the other. The basic idea was a Mediawiki plugin that staged wiki changes to an SVN checkout with Docbook-to-wiki and wiki-to-Docbook conversions happening on the fly.

Something to perhaps think about, but even without that, the Wiki still needs massive TLC. The categorization and filling in of missing content will be greatly appreciated!

Cheers! --Sean 08:48, 12 November 2009 (EST)


It also annoys me that none of the PDF's have a table of contents, but that's not somethign I know how to fix so easily. --Ssd 09:02, 12 November 2009 (EST)


Lots of great updates earlier today! As for the table of contents, are you referring specifically to PDF indices? Otherwise, the big documents (Vol II - Intro to MGED and Vol III - Principles of Eff. Modeling) have tables of contents (on pages vii and iii respectively). They're also part of the larger migration to Docbook as the central document management format so that the PDF files can be continually updated and regenerated, and the documents can be output in different formats (e.g. directly integrated with the wiki or even if just as static html dumps). -- Sean 15:26, 12 November 2009 (EST)

Lots of updates...yes, and did you see the time frame? Those were the easy ones. The rest will take longer, especially as I might actually have to write and/or research the content. As to the PDF's...the document has a toc obviously, but the PDF does not. Yes, I mean the pdf toc/index/bookmark thingie. Very annoying to try to find stuff in there without one. I take it that the docbook material is not yet in the wiki. Has anyone started work on a wiki translator for it? The bidirectional gateway thing sounds interesting but dangerous. --Ssd 00:58, 14 November 2009 (EST)