Possibly too much of an edge case to consider useful, but I noticed that updates to the GP section of the manual have been proposed for pull, and I’d like to read them with the typsetting rendered. I could of course download the repo and build the docs using tex, but it would be nice to be able to just look at a .md file or something similar that will immediately render in the browser. I imagine this might be useful for contributors too since they wouldn’t have to go through the full tex build to check their formatting.
iirc this is on the “would-be-nice-but-nobody’s-got-time-for-that-stuff” list… :/
OTOH if you knew an undergrad who’s familiar with TeX/markdown and needed to read through the manual to learn some Stan anyway maybe it would be a perfect project.
@mike-lawrence :-) I find it easier to deal with LaTeX than markdown for rendering, but I realize I’m an outlier. Our main motivation for switching to markdown (we’ll probably use bookdown) is that it’ll let us have a web-searchable version of the manual and it’ll make contributing a little easier for those that don’t know LaTeX. It won’t just render on GitHub, though, as there’s no MathJax support.
As to timing, it’s exactly as @sakrejda said. We’ll get around to doing it sometime soon (hopefully this year). I think @mitzimorris volunteered at one point, but she’s now having too much fun writing spatial models and extending the langauge, so I’ll probably wind up doing it. I created this mess in the first place.