[OSGeo-Edu] Our proposed educational content andmanagement standard!

[cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu]

Hi Landon and Moritz (and Helena and Maria),

Thanks *SO* much for the thoughtful comments. I'm a couple days from a 7 month
move to New Zealand so am having a hard time now getting to this kind of work.
Ned, Sasha and Maili will cover for me while I travel (until Feb 5th or so) to
the extent they can with their own busy lives!

These are important issues you've raised. Quick reactions:

- I agree with Ned that these are *suggestions* not anything mandatory. Any
content in any "open source" is better than no content.
- I think we should focus on getting the Subversion Edu content system running
so people can post content of any kind already in existence. And develop
instructions to authors on how to use Subversion. One issue that is looming will
be a discussion about licensing of content. But we can deal with that after we
get the infrastructure up.

- Let us get back to you on the XMLMind issue. We would like to have some
tutorial developed for brand-new content with some set of tools as an option for
people. It would be good for someone to look into how equations and such would
work in such a system. Maria, if you have an example for us to try out send it
to Sasha or Maili. I still think DocBook as a "recommended strategy" (but not
mandatory) is a good one however.

That's my reactions for now.

Thanks all for a very helpful discussion!

Charlie



Quoting Landon Blake <lblake at ksninc.com>:

> Ned,
>
> You've pointed out one huge limitation of Scribus: It's really designed
> for a single output format, which is PDF. This definitely limits its
> usefulness for a lot of documentation tasks.
>
> Ned wrote: The best open source WYSIWYG DocBook tools that I'm aware of
> are limited to Linux but I didn't look too hard after I stared using
> XMLMind.
>
> I'll take a look at XMLMind.
>
> Ned wrote: Some limitations I ran
> into with Scribus were that it didn't support HTML output, table support
>
> was minimal and it was difficult to readjust the document every time I
> wanted to update it. I also expect translation would be difficult.
>
> This is something I ran into when working on documentation for OpenJUMP,
> which is used in several languages. It is an excellent point and I'm
> glad you brought it up. One solution I found to the layout & translation
> problem was to keep graphics and text in separate pages of the document
> being produced. I'm not sure how that would translate to Docbook, but it
> is something to think about.
>
> Ned wrote: A number of people are using DocBook for
> publishing books. One of the best know is O'Reilly.
>
> I'd like to learn more about this use of Docbook. I'll have to Google it
> this week.
>
> Landon
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ned Horning [mailto:nedh at lightlink.com]
> Sent: Monday, January 21, 2008 9:56 AM
> To: Landon Blake
> Cc: cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu; smailiidaho at yahoo.com; OSGeo-edu
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Edu] Our proposed educational content andmanagement
> standard!
>
> Landon,
>
> Good comments. Some of my thoughts below.
>
> Landon Blake wrote:
> > As long as there is an inexpensive (preferably FOSS), easy-to-use, and
> > preferably cross-platform tool available. I'm not saying everyone has
> to
> > use this, but the availability of such a tool for authors should be
> > available.
> >
> The best open source WYSIWYG DocBook tools that I'm aware of are limited
>
> to Linux but I didn't look too hard after I stared using XMLMind. There
> could be other good stuff out there. Some people don't like writing XML
> using WYSIWYG editors and for those folks there are a lot of options on
> all platforms.
> > As an example, I'd really love to see a PDF version of the Free GIS
> Book
> > at some point in the future, and even a hard copy version of the book
> > that could be purchased from Lulu or something similar. I don't think
> > you'll find a FOSS tool that will beat Scribus for something like
> > textbook layout.
> >
> Actually I think DocBook would be ideal for this. Some limitations I ran
>
> into with Scribus were that it didn't support HTML output, table support
>
> was minimal and it was difficult to readjust the document every time I
> wanted to update it. I also expect translation would be difficult. I
> expect DocBook will be much easier to deal with as far as revisions and
> language translation go. A number of people are using DocBook for
> publishing books. One of the best know is O'Reilly.
> > I think it is important to avoid making a specification for
> > documentation to great an obstacle for new authors. As an example, I
> had
> > to learn some LaTex to work on the OSGeo journal. This wasn't a great
> > challenge, but I'm guessing some authors would decide it wasn't worth
> > the hassle to contribute.
> >
> This cannot be overstressed. I think, above all, we need to encourage
> people to contribute content. If we do agree on a "standard" and some
> people want to use something else we should try to figure out how best
> to deal with that. We can also build resources to help newcomers get up
> to speed. There are some good DocBook related support materials
> available from a number of large software projects (Ubuntu [1],
> GNOME[2], KDE[3]).
> > I hope I'm not being a real pain in the rear-end.
> >
> You're not a pain in the rear-end. The more input we get the better.
>
> [1] http://doc.ubuntu.com/
> [2] http://library.gnome.org/devel/gdp-style-guide/stable/
> [3] http://l10n.kde.org/docs//styleguide/index.html
>
>
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