#lang scribble/doc
@(require "common.ss")

@title[#:tag "experience"]{Experience}

Scribble is part of the PLT Scheme pre-release version 3.99. Version
4.0 is scheduled for release in May 2008.

The current version includes Scribble-generated documentation for the
core language, the GUI library, Scribble itself, Slideshow, the web
server, several other tools, and dozens of other libraries. The
documentation also includes two brief tutorials and one document that
combines an extended tutorial with an overview of PLT Scheme's major
subsystems. In PDF form, the current documentation totals around 2,500
pages. Most of the documentation has been written by the authors of
Scribble, but many PLT Scheme users have also contributed or written
documentation for their own libraries.

PLT Scheme documentation was previously written in @|latex| and
converted to HTML via @exec{tex2page}@~cite["tex2page"]. Although
@exec{tex2page} was a dramatic improvement over our original use of
@exec{latex2html}, the build process relied on layers of fragile
@|latex| macros, HTML hacks, and pre- and post-processing scripts,
which made the documentation all but impossible to build except by its
authors. Consequently, most library documentation used a plain-text
format that was easier to write but less consistent in style and more
difficult to index. The documentation index distinguished identifier
names from general index terms, but it did not attach a source module
to each identifier name, so online help relied on textual search.

The Scribble-based documentation system is accessible to all PLT
Scheme users, it produces output is that is more consistent and easier
to navigate, and the resulting documentation works better with online
help.