On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 3:02 AM, David Waterman
I use Google Docs/Drive for my own notes, but find it inadequate for any form of polished documentation. The equation editor started off well, being a simple text input field that rendered LaTeX markup, but they scrapped that for a graphical Word style editor that was an enormous step backwards in my opinion. It has improved slightly since then, accepting some LaTeX-like shortcut keys like '_' and '^' for sub- and superscript, but still lacks certain symbols, and the inter-operability with LaTeX that it once had. Also, Google has occasionally changed their Docs engine, requiring me to 'upgrade' my documents to the latest version, which has invariably mangled some of the formatting. For these reasons, much as I like Google Docs for convenience, I would strongly recommend avoiding it for the purpose in mind.
Point taken. Since everyone who might contribute has SVN write access anyway, we don't really need the added convenience.
I briefly explored reStructuredText a while ago, but concluded that it was great for code blocks, but didn't have rich enough math rendering capabilities. Now, revisiting the documentation I wonder if I was wrong? I would like to be able to do vectors and matrices, equation arrays with control over which lines are numbered, and labels to refer to equations in the text. If this is covered easily by reStructuredText then I nominate it as a serious contender.
Well, it does support embedded LaTeX equations: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#math But I suspect it is much less flexible than what you're asking for. So I guess we need to decide whether we want/need to include equations in the tutorial, or just code - if the latter, then RST will suffice, otherwise I have no objection to using LaTeX. (Actually, since we already have a BibTeX bibliography started, that's a very appealing option.) -Nat