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Mathematica 13 (almost) completely obsoletes Workbench

Masso Chailly
Posted 3 years ago

Wolfram Workbench has been (almost) abandoned by WRI, and was lagging terribly behind Mathematica. Now with Mathematica 13 and accompanying PacletTools, the situation has been improved significantly. These are what I have found so far from a few days of tests.

  • DocumentationTools is much more stable and reliable than the previous version (from Mathematica 12).
  • PacletDocumenationBuild fully supports the new format of the PacletInfo.wl file.
  • PacletDocumentationBuild is much faster (on my M1 iMac) than Workbench.
  • PacletBuild does not seems to be backward compatible (I need to further check this), but CreatePacletArchive reliably does the expected job.

Good-bye Workbench!
POSTED BY: Masso Chailly
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Good News!

Although Wolfram hasn't advertised it, it looks like the formatting on Symbol pages was fixed in 13.1. The info button on the symbol hover drop-down is still squirrely, but it's livable with the workaround above. I had to rebuild some pages, since:

  1. Metadata fields have changed (it's simplified)
  2. Metadata has moved to the bottom of the Custom Function, Reference, Tech Note page template.
  3. Tutorials are now officially, and consistently, Tech Notes in all reference fields (but still stored in the Tutorials subdirectory of the paclet documentation).

Most of this was just a copy and paste from my old pages in the old format, which didn't build well. Now, I can't tell the difference between my custom symbol pages and Wolfram's.

Custom Symbol Page from MM 13.1
POSTED BY: Jeffery Henning

There are just a few issues I've found that I'm sure Wolfram will address, but knowing them might save others some of the churn that I went through thinking I wasn't doing it right.

  1. Double/multi-usage lines don't quite format correctly when creating Symbol reference pages (see: https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/2436487)
  2. When building documentation, the Tech Notes section containing Tech Note (Tutorial) links formats correctly on Guide pages, but not on Symbol reference pages. Hopefully this will get fixed soon. Here's the result on my sample Guide and Symbol pages. TechNote on Guide Page =========================================================== TechNote on Symbol Page
  3. The hover button on paclet/package function symbols contains the double-down-chevron that will bring up the usage statement, but the info button (that should link to the Symbol reference page) is still grayed out and unusable. Info Button unavailable
  4. However, if you request the symbol definition with the "?" prefix, the info button on that usage statement is active and does link to the Symbol reference page. Info on Definition popup

Other than these minor issue, the new DocumentationTools work really well and generate seamlessly integrated documentation pages for Paclets/Packages. I'm in the process of converting a big project that was originally created under Wolfram Workbench and most pages build well with the new DocumentationTools.
POSTED BY: Jeffery Henning

I'm having similar success and the built documentation very nearly matches the 12+ Documentation Center formatting. This is a HUGE step forward.

Note that the new PacletBuild performs the PacletDocumentationBuild + CreatePacletArchive all in on step.
POSTED BY: Jeffery Henning
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