New authoring format for tutorials?

[briantoby]

Right now tutorials are written in Word and then saved as HTML files into the tutorials repository. The files are hard to manage; the Word generated HTML is really, really ugly; Word has a tendency to renumber all the graphics.

It would be great to have an ASCII-based format (well Unicode really) that supports figure inclusion and math for creation of Web content. Markdown sounds like a good choice. Some structure is needed to generate the content from Markdown assuming we go with that, but integrate the new content with the old.

[briantoby]

While thinking about tutorials, they really need to have some keywords assigned, so that one knows where to look for some of the "side" examples, like reading from a zip or constraining phase fraction sums (etc.). Then an index & search capability in the wx tutorial browser (or perhaps data downloads could be added into the integrated web browser.)

• could add keywords into tutorialIndex in tutorialIndex.py; would need to review code that uses that (see makeGitTutorial.py and tutorialCatalog generation in GSASIIctrlGUI.py)

[briantoby]

Plan is that we will create a tutorial in markdown and then use pandocs or similar to create a web page from that. Need to also think about creating the data directory with files for user.