userguide?

[ckhung]

Is there a user guide for ethercalc? Does the user guide (or some tutorial ) for socialcalc mostly apply? Googling for "ethercalc syntax", I found a small part of this page by audreyt most resembles what I need -- description of the link and other markup syntaxes. Can we have a few links from the project homepage pointing to helpful pages (whether they are official documents or not) for end users (not developers)? Thanks!

[audreyt]

Yes, SocialCalc tutorials mostly apply.

Would you like to start working on the Wiki here? https://github.com/audreyt/ethercalc/wiki

The project homepage is README.mkdn in this repository plus https://github.com/audreyt/ethercalc.net and https://github.com/audreyt/ethercalc.tw — I've added you as collaborator in all three repositories — it's all yours. :-)

[ckhung]

Thanks! You see I am quite slow (in two senses) :-)

After reading http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2011/03/%E8%B1%90%E5%AF%8C%E6%96%87%E6%9C%AC%E7%B7%A8%E8%BC%AF-%E5%85%AD%E4%B9%8B%E5%9B%9B.html I finally understand that this is a good starting point for the syntax: https://www.socialtext.net/help/wikitext_syntax . Are there other most relevant projects/docs to look at from a novice end-user perspective? While live script is beyond me for now, with a good starting point and a few relevant keywords I can grep in the source code and look for more hints.

[audreyt]

At this point I'm only aware of http://ethercalc.tw/ ( http://ethercalc.net/ ) as the writeup.

I do wonder if switching to Markdown from text-wiki as the default format is a good idea — certainly that's one less language to learn and to document. Thoughts?

[ckhung]

Both are reasonably simple. Both are enough for my personal uses (for now). Haven't compared them. I plan to try all the Wikitext syntaxes from the socialcalc website and only document the diffs. Will do the same if you switch to markdown. So for documentation purposes both work fine, too.

It seems that the user interface part need to be documented from the ground up...

[ckhung]

ok now I realize that it was wrong for me to reference the wikitext syntax for socialtext as a first approximation of ethercalc. I am not sure what Ethercalc uses socialcalc for, but at least the input parsing code is independent, right? For example the url syntax in these two are different. Are there small portions of the ethercalc code that I can read for UI and/or syntax documenting purposes? Or are there a few good search strings for looking into these parts of the codes? Thanks!

[audreyt]

It is actually modeled after the Socialtext wikitext syntax... But a subset for it.

The code is defined here: https://github.com/audreyt/ethercalc/blob/master/third-party/wikiwyg/lib/Document/Parser/Wikitext.js

[ckhung]

Well, even though I can read regexps to some extent, the code is still hard to understand :-( I tried to put some formatting examples such as headings into https://ethercalc.org/cyim151214 but cannot get very far. Wonder if you have time to create a list of formatting examples along with pointers to js source files (best plus line # if I may ask) and I can probably pick up from there?

[audreyt]

Done! (In the spreadsheet you created.)

[ckhung]

Thanks! More questions:

1. where can I find the list of the functions (sqrt, sin, sum, ...) accepted by ethercalc?
2. what is a waflphrase supposed to represent? {...}
3. Is it correct to say that certain formatting tags apply only to multi-line texts? Such as ol, ul, .pre? Those with \n in their source code's regexps?

Maybe I should search for certain keywords to find all syntax/markup-related questions in the past :-)

[audreyt]

1. SocialCalc.Formula.FunctionList — type that in the JS console of a running EtherCalc instance to get the full list. They are defined in https://github.com/audreyt/ethercalc/blob/master/formula1.js and the spec is OpenFormula: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenFormula
2. It's something like a Macro in the Socialtext system; currently EtherCalc does not implement WAFL expansion functionality.
3. Correct.

[rbnmx]

As an alternative to "traditional" user documentation, please consider to use Stack Exchange Web Applications . It's a site similar from the same Q&A sites network of Stack Overflow and Super User but it's for end-users of Web Applications.

A couple of days ago I posted a question there, and few minutes ago an answer with a link to this conversation.

NOTE: I'm just a spreadsheet user that likes to learn about how to take the most from spreadsheets mostly on the Google Help Forums and on the Stack Exchange sites.

[eddyparkinson]

@rubenrivera thanks for your help. I like Stack Exchange. Happy to support Q&A Stack Exchange Web Applications.

[ckhung]

@rubenrivera thanks for pointing that out. For now I just added a link from the wiki to the ethercalc tag page of Stack Exchange Web Applications. Hopefully someday the wiki home page can become a more structural place of links, organized by topics and pointing to more wiki pages, individual SEWA Q&A, tips in past issues, blog posts, etc., before it becomes a fully self-contained document (if ever).