This file gives an overview of changes to the form (not content) of
the PLplot documentation project. For some background about that
project see README.  Alan W. Irwin (AWI), Rafael Laboissiere (RL), and
Andrew Ross (AR) have been the principal contributors to this project
so far.

2013-08-24: AWI implemented using XML/XSL backend tools to generate
our HTML and print (dvi, PostScript, and PDF) documentation results.
Use of the old SGML/DSSSL backend
tools for this task is now deprecated and will be removed
(probably in the next release cycle).  For more details on this
change see README.developers.

2007-03-30: AWI converted the whole PLplot project (including its
documentation source tree) from CVS to subversion.  The conversion
included all of our CVS history (commit messages, tags, and branches)
in the new subversion repository.

2006-11-04: RL retired from working on PLplot development including
the documentation project.

2006-07-28: AR and AWI started implementing support for the
documentation build using our CMake-based build system which was just
being developed at that time for all of PLplot as a replacement for
our previous autotools-based build system.  This overall project (and
especially the documentation build part of this project) went fairly
quickly thanks to years of effort on RL's part improving the
autotools-based build system so that is was modular, (fairly) easy to
understand, and implemented accurate dependencies.

2004-04-29: RL moved the build system from using in-house docbook2x
version 0.7.0 to upstream docbook2x version 0.8.2 for generating the
info form of our documentation.

2003-03-12: RL implemented onsgmls validation of our DocBook source
files.

2003-02-17: RL enforced the use of openjade (as opposed to the
deprecated jade) as an SGM/DSSSL backend tool.

2003-02-12: RL integrated the special autotools build of the
documentation into the overall autotools build of PLplot (which
historically became available much later than the special autotools
build of the documentation that RL originally implemented).

2001 February 8: (Just prior to release of 5.0.2) After the fateful words:
"this marks the end of AWI's work on the API documentation",
AWI worked harder than ever on documentation (some of it with an API
component).  A large source of the additional documentation was all the
files in the doc directory which were from the 1994 latex effort or even
before (rather than 1995 latexinfo effort).  After some consultation with
Maurice these files were transformed (with changes) to DocBook form and were
gradually removed from the cvs as they were superseded by the docbook form.
Sections on devices, driver functions, plrender and metafiles, familying,
interactive output devices, and setting color were added to the advanced
chapter. Chapters on the C and Fortran Language bindings were added and a
vacuous scheme binding chapter was removed. A (short) bibliography chapter
was added as well as chapters on the exclusive (non-common) C and Fortran
api (most of these transferred from the common-api chapter).  The Reference
part of the document (including the Bibliography and all the API chapters)
was put at the back of the document.

2000 December 04: RL finished the XML man backend.

2000 November 30: RL implemented the XML/XSL info backend.  The html and
print backends continue to be SGML/DSSSL.

2000 November 17: RL finished conversion of DocBook SGML to DocBook XML.
This change did not affect the backend tools which were still SGML/DSSSL
at this stage.

2000 November 15: AWI finished documenting the previously undocumented API
functions by lifting the comments from the code source.  Those comments
usually did not include anything about the meaning of the function
parameters so that continued lack of documentation for the parameters is now
marked by "NEEDS DOCUMENTATION" rather than the previous ??? which was
ambiguous.  This occurs about 160 times in api.sgml and needs to be
addressed by the PLplot gurus. Since AWI is not one of those, this marks the
end of AWI's work on the API documentation (but not other kinds of
documentation work).

2000 November 13: AWI moved CHANGES NEWS  (which is the more appropriate
name for this file).  AWI also put information about Cygnus DocBook into
README.developers.

2000 November 12: RL removes "forgot $" bug in configure.  AWI confirms that
the refined configuration system properly checks catalogs again.

2000 November 10: AWI made extensive improvements to all sgml source using
the "aspell" spell-checker.

2000 November 9: AWI converted remaining latexinfo source to cplus.sgml,
tcl.sgml, gui.sgml, perl.sgml, python.sgml, and scheme.sgml. The first two
add a large amount of documentation while the last 4 are simply placeholders
waiting for documenters to get busy.  This completes the conversion of the
1995 latexinfo to DocBook, but there are some possible 1994 latex (as
opposed to latexinfo) appendix files that may be useful enough to convert as
well but which were not included in the 1995 conversion of the documentation
from latex to latexinfo.

2000 November 4 (AWI): extensive changes to Makefile.in plus split
functionality of old README into README plus CHANGES.

2000 November 3 (AWI): Refined configuration so that it worked on both
Debian/potato and RedHat 6.2 (with a workaround for the broken principal
catalog for that system).  Also made extensive changes to
../README.developers.

2000 October 30-31 (RL): Generalized configuration method using autoconf,
configure.in approach.

2000 October 19 (AWI and RL): added the plplot docbook documentation project
to the sourceforge cvs repository at location plplot/doc/docbook-sgml.  The
source was http://www.icp.inpg.fr/~rafael/plplotdoc/src with some additional
files (jatex.cfg and over-under.tex) added later by RL. eps2jpeg.pl and the
Makefile were then modified to make the build work on Debian/potato.

