@bobthechemist Here's an attempt to show why the two definitions are the same.

SE just suspected me to be a bot (I had to verify that I'm not a robot with this nice checkbox thingy). Does that also happen to you or should I bother?

If you just had to tick the box, it means that it checked that you seemed like a human from your browsing activity, mouse movement etc. I don't know about SE, but in general on other websites it occurs when your behaviour pattern is similar to that of a bot (doing the same action repeatedly for instance, or trying to log in multiple times etc). I wouldn't worry.

@JimB That's a useful explanation, thank you.

I keep getting the following error:

I"m using V11.3.0.0 on a Mac (10.13.5). Anyone else getting it?

@HenrikSchumacher It happens from time to time (biut very rarely)

@b3m2a1 @Szabolcs I am trying to add to an existing package documentation and build it outside of workbench with a minimal effort. I tried BTools but it needs broader setup/configuration and fine grained interface is not public I think, I don't want to add more than I need for docs. I tried with jkuczm's solution but few things are off, DocumentationBuild is not on path etc.

I probably could work those sources out but I don't have time :) I don't care atm so much. So that is my question, what is a robust and stable way to buildDocumentation[sourceDir, packageDir]? (You can assume source is prepared because BTools's DocGen works nicely.

Or @anyoneWhoBuildsDocumentationWithoutWWB

@Kuba I gave up on this because it seemed too complicates. I think that the "proper" solution would be either that one by jkuczm or using ant.

BTW Workbench: avoid Java 10! It won't build docs with it due to an Eclipse bug. Stay with Java 8 until the next Eclipse comes out in a month or so.

(Maybe this doesn't apply on Windows though)

@Szabolcs yeah, matching Java, Eclipse and WWB source made me abandon WWB a long time ago. I usually work on 3-4 machines with different frequencies, and making everything everywhere in sync was a lot of pain

@Szabolcs DocumentationBuild` comes from WWB only, right?

@Kuba Yes.

I just build docs with Workbench now ... and only for MaTeX. I am afraid to build larger documentation this way. What if they break something? The WB-generated docs are already ugly in newer M versions without post processing, and I fully expect them to break backwards compatibility when they fix that problem ...

Lately Mathematica is stealing focus when it finishes a computation

THis didn't happen before.

Is there a setting or something controlling this behavior? It's a bit annoying

@Szabolcs @Szabolcs how backwards compatible do you need? I was working for a bit to get 11.0 and 11.1+ to look nice together (I think I have that now). It's likely not all that much work layered on top to push back to, say, 10, if someone's willing to spend some time helping me debug that.

@Kuba @halirutan @Szabolcs how feasible do you think it is to set up something like ReadTheDocs (MD based docs in standardized format in standardized location) for Mathematica? I have the NB->MD and MD->HTML workflow down and could merge this into a secondary repo for the the paclet server if there were a consistent standard for making a set of source NBs for me to generate from.

I could also do proper Mathematica docs to HTML using the converter I have for those, but that almost feels overkill...

And those docs aren't terribly amenable to theming and customization

@b3m2a1 I think this is good idea but need to think if enforcing standards will work

@b3m2a1 thanks for reply to issues. could you just briefly say how to build docs from project/src/documentation to project/pacletName/documentation?

@Kuba As far as "standards" go I think a collection of Markdown notebooks would be fine, right? That'll let people be pretty flexible about it.

@Kuba what is the format of the things in the source directory?

@b3m2a1 notebooks generated by DocGen, but I am flexible about that

I have to go so thanks in advance

One unfortunate mistake I made was never writing out a converter for WRI's build templates. I need to write a converter between their templates and mine but it'll be an annoying process.

If they're the templates from DocGen then you do something like:

DocGen["SymbolPage", Evaluate@NotebookOpen[#, Visible -> False],
   Method -> {"Save", Directory -> target}
   ] & /@ files

I never thought about going directly from template file to other file because I don't think these things though enough. Oh don't forget to close those notebooks.

so maybe:

With[{nb = NotebookOpen[#, Visible -> False]},
   (NotebookClose[nb]; #) &@
    DocGen["SymbolPage", nb,
     Method -> {"Save", Directory -> target}
     ]
   ] & /@ files

If they're fully built pages then you can move them directly. If you want to keep access to them via Command-Shift-F (or F1 on Windows) then you'll need to get them somewhere the paclet manager can see them. I do that in the build process directly with PacletManager`PacletDirectoryAdd.

DocGen needs a lot of little fixes and patches here and there, so thanks for reporting them. Once those are done, though, and I have the whole feature set documented I think it'll be very useful.