2013/08/02

Status update and Doxygen rant

It has been two weeks snce my last update, so I wanted to let you guys know what I am currently at. The good news is that the new coordinate systems have been implemented and are ready to use. Of course there is still the obligatory last check to do, but i expect everything to be fine. All methods that got the axe are now gone as well and have been put into extension methods and ZIPped into archives; that way no one will accidently use the deprecated API. I also added a section called Legacy Support to the manual with instructions.

Now for the promised rant. I have transitioned all the documentation to Doxygen, both scripting reference and user manual. Now all that would be left would be to sprinkle some CSS fairy dust on top of it so it looks nice and I'm done. Except editing the CSS is an exercise in pure trial & error frustration, there is no documentation for it and the code is barely commented. The manual is a pain in the butt as well, it's like it was written for people who already know how to use Doxygen. It will go into detail about all the possible ways of formating my text, but it doesn't explain how to get the text into the manual in a specific order. Don't worry, I got it all covered now, but it was not a fun journey.

I wanted to slim down the default HTML design, because I think the large header buttons at the top are too large and vibrant, but I've had it with Doxygen. Don't get me wrong, it's a great system and I'm sure everything made perfect sense when wrting it, but it is obscure from the outside. Anyway, I'm going to stick with the default design for now, but at least I limited the size of images so they don't disrupt the flow of the text. There probably won't be any PDF documentation anymore though, the HTML is more flexible to read and navigate, plus the PDF generated by Doxygen looks rather... ugly.

Now that I've got everything out of the way it's time to wrap it up and hopefully get it released next week.