Documentation.

Documenation.

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The SIPB provides a variety of documentaion to users. Some we've purchased, some we've copied out of other manuals, and some are from

SIPB-Written Documents

The Board has written several introductory documents, all of which are given free to users who need them.

An Inessential Quick Reference to Athena is a one sheet manual that contains the least you need to know to use Athena. For more detail, see {\em Getting Started on Athena}, available at Graphic Arts for free.

The Inessential Guide to Athena provides a catalog of the less-publicized commands and capabilities of the Athena system of people who have learned the basics of Unix. This document is for more experienced Unix users. Beginners should refer to An Essential Guide to Athena.

Inessential LaTeX is a short guide to the more commonly used features of this typesetting system. Currently, LaTeX is one of the two supported text-processing systems, and the only one both powerfull and stable enough for thesis work. Athena itself provides several documents on LaTeX through Graphic Arts, and full manuals are available in the office.

Netnews: A One-Page Guide to the Usenet is intended to provide the absolute minimum information required to keep things working smoothly for users of the Usenet. For more details, you should see the newsgroup 

 news.announce.newusers.

How to Use xdvi is a short guide to using the program xdvi, which can be used to view DVI files such as those produced by LaTeX.

Discuss - Using Discuss is a guide to using Discuss, a networked electronic conferencing system. For more details, see the office manual under Discuss.

Inessential AFS describes the Andrew File System and how it is used. AFS is a network file system or a distributed file system. This means that the files you gain access to through AFS do not actually reside on the workstation you are using.

How to Make More Documentation

If you want to write a new SIPB document, simply tell people (so as to avoid duplicating work, and possibly get suggestions) and start doing it. Once you've got a draft, /afs/sipb/project/doc is a good place to put it (usually in its own subdirectory.) Be sure to put draft copies around the office so that people ``bleed'' on them, ie. scribble on them with comments one what they think is wrong, poor, or badly typeset. (Don't get discouraged by it -- would you rather have thousands of users notice instead?)

Once a document is useful enough to be handed out to people, we need to make sure copies exist. Survey of in-stock documents is done during the ``Documentation Report'' section of the weekly meeting; if anything is critically low, someone volunteers to get more copies made. This involves estimating how many new copies are needed, getting a requisition filled out, having the Office of the VP of IS sign it (namely, Kathy Allen, though in theory anyone with signing authority can do this. [find out her real title!]), and then taking the originals (which are usually filed in the documentation drawer) and the requisition down to Graphic Arts and having them done. [Someone who has actually done this should expand and correct it.]

On Line Help

The Athena OLH system doesn't actually contain any documentation, it only points off to other documentation subsystems. To put your document under OLH, let Sharon Belville (or the docsourc mailing list???) know about it, in particular give them a filename of a .dvi file that will stay around (preferably under /afs/sipb/project/doc/...) and they'll weave it into their web.
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