Where is the reference guide now?

General
1

I know it’s supposed to be in HTML form, but I don’t know where to find it. It’s not on the documentation page of the Stan webpage: http://mc-stan.org/users/documentation/index.html

2

@seantalts put together the 2.18 release.

The make target build docs generates everything under doc. There’s both an HTML and PDF version of the reference manual, and just pdfs of the user’s guide and functions reference so far.

We need to actually host the HTML in order for search to work. It uses lunr.js and for some reason only works from a web server.

3

How do you make stan-reference.pdf now? I thought that was intentionally removed and split into a user’s guide and functions reference?

4

I’ll put in a PR to update the site with the user’s guide for now…

1 Like
5

There are five things being generated by the doc target.

  1. reference-manual/index.html + reference-manual-<version>.pdf
  2. users-guide.pdf
  3. functions-reference.pdf
  4. functions.txt (which I think gets used in RStan somehow)
6

Ah, okay. I didn’t see that first one before, maybe I was looking for stan-reference.pdf or in CmdStan (which doesn’t generate it on doc yet). My bad.

We could already post a link to a specific CircleCI build artifact like this one: https://8-8043756-gh.circle-artifacts.com/0/root/project/doc/reference-manual/index.html But CircleCI says

Artifacts are designed to be useful around the time of the build. It is best practice not to rely on artifacts as a software distribution mechanism with long term future guarantees.

7

I think we should put the reference manual up on mc-stan.org.

We had talked about versioning it or not. The problem is that we run into the Boost links into old versions problem. It’d be nice if we could have something like a current version then and old versions. Then hopefully links will be to the current version which wouldn’t change much.

We had decided to just have the most recent, which means we should probably wait for RStan and PyStan. But we may want to rethink that given the lag from CmdStan to RStan and PyStan.

8

Now that rstan and pystan are released, isn’t it hight time to link 2.18 documentation to (mc-stan.org) ? The documentation page still points to the 2.17 version…

9

Yes and thanks for the heads up.

We’ve made some changes to the doc—the reference manual and functions reference will continue to be released with the releases, but the user’s guide is going to trail a bit and actually have more real code in it. It was moved to its own repo.

They’re all available in HTML now and in PDF, so we have to work out how we’re going to host the HTML to not lead to the kind of version confusing you see in Boost, for example.