CGAL users discussion list

[Andreas Meyer <>]

Eivind LM wrote:
> I would like to make a little comment on this, humble as the new user 
> I am. First of all, I must say the CGAL documentation is really 
> outstanding. You have obviously put a lot of work into documenting 
> everything.
>
> The only thing I'm missing is a quick way to look up information about 
> a given type. When I'm writing my little program and have a pointer to 
> an X, I always wonder for example what method I can call on X to give 
> me Y (e.g X is a Face_handle and Y is a point). Even if I have read 
> the documentation for X before, I need a way to recall it quickly, 
> since I don't always remember from last time I used an X what members 
> it has, or what section of the manual it's documented.
>
> All members of all types seems to be very well documented already, the 
> thing is that it's just (for me at least) a barrier to have to 
> identify the right section of the manual first. I have to think in 
> order to find what I need. It's not very much thinking involved, but 
> it's enough to get me slightly distracted from the programming. Since 
> I only have one of those good ol' single-threaded brains, with slow 
> and lossy context switches, I perefer if my brain would not have to be 
> involved in finding the reference :)
>
> So I think one long HTML page that lists all types in CGAL, which 
> links directly to the paragraph that describes each type, would be 
> very useful. I'm thinking of something like the lower left frame of 
> the java sdk api [1] ("All classes").
>
> Then I could autonomously open this index page, search on the page 
> with my browser to find the type in question, and finally just click a 
> link to see all relevant information about my type.
>
> How do you like the idea?
>
> Best regards,
> Eivind LM

Hi!

Currently, there are two ways to achieve this: the whole-manual index, 
which can be found below 
"http://www.cgal.org/Manual/3.3/doc_html/cgal_manual/manual_index.html";. 
It lists member functions, classes, functions etc.

Additionaly, there is a per-package list of "entities", one which lists 
all classes, concepts, functions etc in alphabetic order, and one which 
lists them per category, see for example 
http://www.cgal.org/Manual/3.3/doc_html/cgal_manual/Triangulation_2_ref/Chapter_intro.html

I dont know if you considered these already, so if you have additional 
ideas, do not hesitate to formulate them :-)

Best Regards,
Andreas Meyer