[Qgis-community-team] Re: latex coding practices

[Otto Dassau]

Hi Tara,

On Tue, 06 May 2008 20:44:21 -0700
Tara Athan <tara_athan at alt2is.com> wrote:

> OK, I was able to download the latex version of the manual and take a 
> quick look through the various sections.

good! I also added a new "task and management area" page at the wiki, where we
can put important help information and more for the community team (also linked
from frontpage): http://wiki.qgis.org/qgiswiki/CommunityTeamTasks

On that page there are links to other "management" pages for manual, gui
translation, Conference Corner areas, so finally if we feed it we have
descriptions of what is important for community assistants to know, what tasks
are open etc.

I started to add the information we collected on the mailing list about how to
start with svn and latex using different OS for the manual page. Please add more
information for windows, while you learn to work with it.

> What I see is a lot of inconsistency in format between sections.
> This is to be expected, I guess, if the sections are written by 
> different authors and there is no agreement beforehand as to format.
> But I think we need to aim for greater consistency for the 1.0 manual 
> release.
> For a start, I would like to have macros for inline styles to 
> distinguish command line inputs, file names, buttons and so on.
> I see this done frequently in software manuals-  there is a different 
> style of type for each category, and these are clearly spelled out in 
> the introduction.
> 
> At present there is a wide variety of formats being used.  \textsl is 
> used for a lot of different things, so it is not obvious when you see 
> text formated as \textsl what it corresponds to. And the same type of 
> item, such as an input field selection, is sometimes \textsl, sometimes 
> in quotes, sometimes \textbf, ...

yes you are right, we used the latex styles very laxy so far. \textsl is a good
example. Now that we decided to "really" review and update the manual it is a
good idea to make it properly ;-)

What I remember and liked a lot was the way Gary defined makros for his QGIS
workhop at foss4g in Canada. http://blog.qgis.org/node/86. Maybe you can have a
look if that is sth. we can imagine to include as well. 

> I would like to hear what the document writers think.

=> I think it is a great idea and one of the tasks we need to do before we start
with the manual.

thanks
 Otto

> Tara
> 
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