Re: Reference manual

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
> As far as the HTML-formatted docs go and as far as 7.1 (and future) goes,
> there should only be exactly one link, which points to the index.html of
> the intergrated doc.  There will no longer be separated docs, because
> that's why there's an integrated doc with a title page and all the links.

A complaint that someone made on the lists last night crystallized
something that's been bothering me for awhile now: the front page of the
integrated docs (http://www.postgresql.org/devel-corner/docs/postgres/)
is too sparse.  If you don't already understand the layout of the docs,
it's not clear where you want to go from here.

I think it would work a lot better if this page showed not just the six
top-level document names, but the first sublevel (ie, chapter headings)
within each one.  That would give people a sense of what is in each
document, and it'd also save a level of click-through in many cases,
since you could click straight to the chapter you want.  It looks like
this would expand the page from six lines to about fifty, which doesn't
seem unreasonable.

I have no idea if this is easy, hard, or impossible to do given our
current documentation tools, but if it's possible I think it would be
a good improvement.

            regards, tom lane