Re: gnuplot-mode and Gnuplot licensing question

[sfeam (E. Merritt) <eam...@gm...>]

On Thursday, 09 February 2012, Jonathan Oddie wrote:
> 
> Hi Ethan,
> 
> >> 
> >> Could anyone tell me whether this would be considered acceptable use?
> > 
> > I don't understand the intended mechanism.
> > 
> 
> Sorry I wasn't clear. No, I'm not intending to maintain a separate set
> of documentation. (I use the info viewer inside Emacs for reading
> that, and the code I'm working on creates links to it from the source
> buffer). What I'm thinking of are more like what are called "tooltips"
> in other environments. In other Emacs language modes (C, Lisp, etc.)
> you can have the editor show a one-line message at the bottom of the
> screen listing the arguments to a function as soon as you type it or
> move the cursor over it, and this saves looking up the full
> manual. E.g. when the cursor is after "smooth" Emacs displays
> 
> smooth {unique | frequency | cumulative | kdensity ... }
> 
> or something similar. Or after typing "using" in a plot command with a
> particular plot style it lists the order of columns expected. I find
> this quite useful as I often forget the order of arguments to some
> options.
> 
> I guess this is a maintenance concern to an extent since the
> documentation strings would be in the Elisp source (they can't really
> be extracted automatically from the info page, as far as I can see). I
> think the benefit might outweigh the cost. What do you think?
> 
> Jonathan

Ugh. Not from the info page.  Does anyone really use that?

I'd say the better method would be to write a quick doc2tooltip.c
program to parallel the others.  It would look for the string
   Syntax:
in gnuplot.doc and extract the following lines into a tooltip
collection.

Probably there are some commands that don't have this keyword
in the current *.doc file, but it seems reasonable to standardize
them  if it helps a real-world use.

	Ethan