[Developers] ADMB Manual Class

[John Sibert]

Hi Arni -

Thanks for testing the class. You picked up a bunch of errors that did 
not occur on my ubuntu 9.10 system. And, of course, I never gave windows 
a thought.

In the short term, I will pass your experience along to, Kathy 
Hargreaves, my contact at Dangerous Curve. She really got into this 
project and and was a pleasure to work with. She will probably want to 
fix these errors. In the longer term, we could either maintain the 
package ourselves or contract with DC to do it for us.

If there are no missing packages, I see no reason why we cannot 
distribute them with the admbmanual class.

Cheers,
John

Arni Magnusson wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> The admbmanual.cls looks promising, but I'm experiencing some hiccups:
>
> 1. On my Windows machine, the makefile generates a broken 
> admb-sample.ind, where
>
> \\begin{theindex}\n\\thispagestyle{fancy}\n
>
> should be
>
> \begin{theindex}
> \thispagestyle{fancy}
>
> Everything looked fine after I fixed this manually. I have a bunch of 
> LaTeX packages installed, but I needed to install four additional 
> packages for admbmanual.cls:
>
> anyfontsize
> chappg
> smallcap
> tocbibind
>
> It was easy to install those packages in Windows, so the only problem 
> when creating the manual in Windows was caused by extra backslashes in 
> the makefile.
>
> 2. On both of my Linux machines (one Kubuntu 8.04 and another Fedora 
> 11), the make process halted because the 'anyfontsize' package is 
> missing. This relatively new package is not available from the package 
> managers; it seems to be available for the newest Kubuntu 9.10, but 
> not for the newest Fedora 12. When I installed 'anyfontsize' manually, 
> the make process halted with these last words:
>
> Making admb-sample
> pdflatex --interaction batchmode admb-sample
> This is pdfTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.40.3 (Web2C 7.5.6)
> %&-line parsing enabled.
> entering extended mode
> #pdflatex admb-sample
> cp admb-sample.log admb-sample.1.log
> bibtex admb-sample
> This is BibTeX, Version 0.99c (Web2C 7.5.6)
> The top-level auxiliary file: admb-sample.aux
> The style file: plain.bst
> I couldn't open database file admb-sample.bib
> ---line 29 of file admb-sample.aux
> : \bibdata{admb-sample
> : }
> I'm skipping whatever remains of this command
> I found no database files---while reading file admb-sample.aux
> (There were 2 error messages)
> make: *** [all] Error 2
>
> In Windows, everything seemed to work fine without an admb-sample.bib 
> file, so I'm not sure what the problem is. One symptom is that the 
> half-baked manual is missing the "Index" entry from the table of 
> contents.
>
> ---
>
> These issues are probably not very hard to fix and get all the 
> buildbot machines to generate the new manuals. The issues also remind 
> us that future modifications will be necessary. Is the idea to have 
> the copyright holder (Dangerous Curve, Los Angeles) maintain 
> admbmanual.cls, or will we do it ourselves? We may e.g. be interested 
> in adding some automatic formatting of ADMB code, like boldface 
> SECTIONs and FUNCTIONs.
>
> Updating the manuals is a major improvement that has ranked high on my 
> list of ADMB priorities. The addition of Getting Started, the 
> Reference Card, the upcoming FAQ, the proofreading of old manuals, and 
> the fancy new style, it all helps. It sounds like the initial plan is 
> to maintain four "official" ADMB manuals (Getting Started, AUTODIF, 
> ADMB, ADMB-RE) plus the reference card.
>
> With time, we may decide to merge the Getting Started manual into the 
> ADMB manual. We could also create a garden for user-contributed 
> documentation, similar to http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html. 
> It won't be long until we see ADMB tutorials in non-English languages, 
> for example.
>
> Arni
>
>
>
> On Fri, 2 Apr 2010, John Sibert wrote:
>
>> Thanks for participating in a productive meeting. I had a bit of time 
>> in SFO airport yesterday, so I worked on the reformatted and proofed 
>> manuals. I hope to make them generally available next week. 
>> Ultimately they will be inserted into the buildbot (in place of the 
>> current versions).
>>
>> The attached archive contains all you should need to process a LaTeX 
>> document with the new document class. I tested it on the new "getting 
>> started" guide and it works OK (there were some issues with the guide 
>> itself, such as case errors in file names). I thought you guys might 
>> be interested in testing the new class before it is posted on the 
>> website. The package expects to have the logo and license files 
>> somewhere that LaTeX can find them. For testing purposes, I suggest 
>> putting your document in the ADMBManualClass directory created when 
>> the archive uzips. There are a couple of PDFs in the archive that 
>> should help your get started.
>>
>> Enjoy,
>>
>> John
>>
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-- 
John Sibert
Emeritus Researcher, SOEST
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Visit the ADMB project http://admb-project.org/