Interest in offline / PDF documentation?

General Discussion
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Is there any interest in an offline PDF version of the documentation? Or a folder of local HTML files?

Here’s an example draft (PDF 67 MB)

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I think it looks good, although I feel like it might not be necessary until we’ve got the current documentation sorted. I’d really appreciate seeing some developer documentation in there as well, perhaps a general layout and “FAQ” for developers, where people could look if they want to try and make changes.

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The offline manual / pdf indeed would be welcome for similar reasons as e.g., for the handbook about openbabel (on the elder website). The pdf here already is a large leap forward which on few occasions needs a hand e.g.,

  • a table of contents is missing
  • the \eta on p. 62 were lost – though hapticity exponents passed
  • empty boxes about basic use / illustrations on p. 79
  • unit cells (pp. 143) appear twice (light & dark scheme like) each time
  • the distortion (perhaps because it is not an orthoscopic projection) of the Primitive Unit Cell (p. 150/151) feels a bit (too) heavily distorted
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Thanks - one thing that came up in the LaTeX processing errors was the use of Unicode symbols, such as \eta - and I have no idea why the ToC didn’t run. (Also many section headings are off - possibly related.)

The easier thing is perhaps making a ZIP of the HTML output, but I know some would still prefer to have a PDF, so I’ll see what I can do going forward.

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Hi. First of all thanks for you wonderful work, and for the recent release of the Version 2. I was very happy discovering the PDF version of the manual in the Github repository. The main reason for me is that it in this way, contrary to the web version, it is possible to provide the PDF to Notebooklm, and then proceed with a several types of processing, as podcast, mind map, video presentation, infographics and, very important, possibility to chat with the system about the many features of the program. For example today I was trying with the exercise about cyclohexane derivatives (Pag. 343), and discussed in NBLM why my values of energy differ from those of the figures in the manual. I attach a simple infographics NBLM made directly after reading all the PDF manual (there are a few errors in the text, but is the first version it made).

NBLm Avogadro 2 Info
NBLm Avogadro 2 Info1920×1072 530 KB

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Interesting point - I hadn’t realized that NotebookLLM can’t process a website. Can it take like a zip of a bunch of HTML files? I haven’t used it much.

I’ll see what I can to to fix up some of the LaTeX processing issues - probably needs some settings fixes. Seems like it would at least be useful to some folks.

I will note that I worry significantly about LLM providing “answers” even based on the documentation. They’re fairly good at summarization tasks, but I still see a good number of hallucinations. I’d much rather point people to the forum where there are obviously plenty of real humans available to answer questions and suggestions.

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Hi. Before discovering the existence of the PDF version on Github, I made several attempts to use directly the web version of the manual in NBLM. But it failed to understand the structure of the entire document, it seems unable to automatically parse all the content. I also tried some browser extensions to transform the web pages into epub or pdf, but the results were quite poor.
I fully understand your concern about the reliability of LLM in providing acceptable answers. I am a physicist by formation and nowadays I work as a teacher, so the question of Artificial Intelligence in school/academia is surely a debated issue. My personal position is quite simple. I am experimenting with the main models and some particular solutions using them, to understand which are the real possibilities and defects, and also to track the evolution of the field. NBLM should have some advantages respect to the normal “generalist” LLMs, just due to the fact that it “mainly” use the sources provided by the user. This, in theory, should reduce the number of hallucinations, but obviously it is important to always check.
In my case, at beginning I only uploaded the Avogadro manual, and then started some exercises with its “assistance”. For the sake of cleanliness I will open a new thread here to discuss some problems I found respect to values reported in the manual.
Thanks for the attention and for your work.

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I would be interested in a pdf preferably to the html folder but would like either.