3 Planned improvements to Starlink documents

Major improvements to Starlink’s documents are underway (see SGP/42). Two key ones are:

• Cookbooks.
• Hypertext.

3.1 Cookbooks

These provide recipes for common types of data reduction. Users will, therefore, not need to understand a package in depth before being able to do useful work with it. They are issued as Starlink Cookbooks (SC).

3.2 Hypertext

This publishes Starlink information on the World Wide Web in the form of HTML files, and enables Starlink documents to be linked together as an integrated whole, using a hypertext linker called HTX (see SUN/188). Starlink documents are written mostly in LATEX. New documents are produced in both hypertext and paper form. Old documents which only exist in paper form can be converted to HTML form by translators such as Star2HTML (see SUN/199).

The hypertext infrastructure software and organisation required is now operational (see SUN/188). The work of transforming the current document set to hypertext form is proceeding rapidly.

A beginner’s guide to HTML has been distributed as MUD/149. An updated version of this is available on the web at: