[OSGeo-Edu] OSGeo Education Activity Summary For Report

[Landon Blake]

Charlie wrote: " If anyone wants to try summarize where we are on the
docbook/LaTex and subversion/wiki dialog I have missed I'd appreciate
it."

I think there was some firm support for DocBook, and I got the
impression that is where people wanted to go with this. Here were some
of my own concerns about using DocBook:

- The learning curve for new authors.
- The lack of a FOSS GUI editor for DocBook.
- The steps involved in converting DocBook to other formats like PDF.

I believe the last concern could be addressed by some simple scripting?
I believe someone was going to check into that and report back to the
list.

I think there was some agreement that Subversion was great for
versioning, but not real great for metadata and content search/indexing.
I sent a proposed OSGeo Educational Metadata file to the list. It was an
example metadata file based on one of my articles for the OSGeo Journal.
I offered to write a simple desktop GUI that could be used to search
metadata files of this type to locate OSGeo educational content.

There was also some development on the Free GIS Book side of things:

- The rough draft of Geospatial Metadata chapter for the Free GIS Book
was completed. Dr. Markus Lupp asked to review the chapter and I
provided him with the document in ODT format. 

- Everyone agreed to allow me to use the chapter as a substitute article
replacing my next spatial relationship article in Volume 4 of the OSGeo
Journal. This may give the Free GIS Book some needed exposure.

- I started to layout a PDF version of the book chapter using Scribus.

Landon

P.S. I got to try out Lyx, the FOSS LaTex editor, and I really like it.
I would personally prefer using that tool and LaTex. This is what we are
already using for the OSGeo Jorunal, and Lyx offers "one-click" PDF
generation.


-----Original Message-----
From: cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu [mailto:cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2008 11:39 PM
To: Landon Blake
Cc: OSGeo-edu
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Edu] Moving Forward With Our Docbook/LaTex
discussion.

Quoting Landon Blake <lblake at ksninc.com>:

> Did we ever come to a decision on what format we were going to explore
> for OSGeo Education content?

Hi Landon and all,

Thanks for your energy Landon -- it's appreciated. I'm now back online
and
settled in New Zealand. I'm working through a massive stack of emails.
If anyone
wants to try summarize where we are on the docbook/LaTex and
subversion/wiki
dialog I have missed I'd appreciate it.

Also, Tyler needs an Edu committee status report by the 15th. I can put
it
together, but if you have any status on work relevant to the OSGeo Edu
group,
please send me a little summary.

Thanks in advance!

Charlie


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