Revised Help for GSAS-II

[briantoby]

GSAS-II does not have a user manual, but it does have context-specific help that is written on each section of the GUI with tips on what that section does and how to use it. (GSAS-II also has many tutorials and copious code documentation.) You access this Help information using:

• the Help question mark button, or (this is in the upper right of main GSAS-II window).
• or with the help button on the plot window: .
• Also, the Help menu has "Help on GSAS-II" and "Help on current data tree item" to access the same help information.

The contents of that help had originally been one big web page and later three still very big web pages. That contents was edited in Word and was not very easy to read (or update for that matter). (An example of the old files)

With the help of a collaborator from Japan, who has not yet given me permission to use their name, the pages were recast in MarkDown formatting and divided into ~40 web pages that are much shorter and convenient to read and edit. The new and much more nicely formatted pages can be viewed here and as an added gift from the mkdocs formatter we are using, can also be collated into a big PDF document.

The MarkDown "source code" for the Help is here and I am already finding it easier to add things when faced with a question or when adding a feature, but you as a GSAS-II user, are invited to suggest corrections and additions in any format, but Pull Requests would make this really easy for us.