Looking at the section "Source Spectrum and Spatial Distribution" -- There is a lot of information here. I think you could break these up into just "Source Spectrum" and "Source Spatial Distribution" or just plain "SpectrumType" and "SourceType" headers, since those are the relevant keywords.
The paragraph style also makes it difficult to keep track of the hierarchy of parameters. I kind of like the format, for example, of Table 4.2 to help me keep track of such things. It could look like this:
FILE & SpectrumFile & (phot/s/cm^2/keV), include binning description in text \
& SourceFlux & < 0 to use data in SpectrumFile \
& & > 0 to renormalize SpectrumFile \
Finally, I realize now that the major issue is that I didn't know which SourceFlux value MARX uses as default. I assumed the default was to use the true values in SpectrumFile (and therefore SourceFlux = -1) because that made sense in my head. Also, I imagine that having SourceFlux = -1 as default when SpectrumType=FLAT would force the user to define a SourceFlux and avoid any future mistakes. So it was basically my assumptions that messed things up for me.
A user commented:
Hi Moritz, here are some of my thoughts on the MARX documentation.
I worked from this page: http://space.mit.edu/ASC/MARX/inbrief/simsetup.html
Looking at the section "Source Spectrum and Spatial Distribution" -- There is a lot of information here. I think you could break these up into just "Source Spectrum" and "Source Spatial Distribution" or just plain "SpectrumType" and "SourceType" headers, since those are the relevant keywords.
The paragraph style also makes it difficult to keep track of the hierarchy of parameters. I kind of like the format, for example, of Table 4.2 to help me keep track of such things. It could look like this:
SpectrumType & Parameter & Description \ FLAT & MinEnergy & (keV) \ & MaxEnergy & (keV) \ & SourceFlux & (phot/s/cm^2) \
FILE & SpectrumFile & (phot/s/cm^2/keV), include binning description in text \ & SourceFlux & < 0 to use data in SpectrumFile \ & & > 0 to renormalize SpectrumFile \
Finally, I realize now that the major issue is that I didn't know which SourceFlux value MARX uses as default. I assumed the default was to use the true values in SpectrumFile (and therefore SourceFlux = -1) because that made sense in my head. Also, I imagine that having SourceFlux = -1 as default when SpectrumType=FLAT would force the user to define a SourceFlux and avoid any future mistakes. So it was basically my assumptions that messed things up for me.