[mapserver-dev] Feedback required: plans for Downloadable Users Manual

[Daniel Morissette]

Hi Jeff,

I like what you propose. I think that we should see this as a work in 
progress and additional sections/chapters can be added in future 
revisions of the manual as needed, based on users feedback.

A few notes/suggestions:

- I think the interest of a downloadable users manual is to be 
self-contained and not rely on an internet connection, or on external 
docs unless absolutely required. In addition to pointing to HOWTOs and 
ref docs in the text, what would you think of including copies of all 
those HOWTOs and references in appendices at the end of the PDF itself? 
Perhaps there could be two versions of the manual: the lite version 
which relies on external refs, and the thick version which includes 
copies of the external references in appendices? That would really be 
two copies of the same document, with and without the appendices.

- Have you thought about the process to generate the manual? It would be 
great to have an automated process, a kind of makefile or script that 
pulls the relevant docs out of SVN, processes them and spits out the 
updated manual from the latest docs. I am not the person to advise on 
the tools to use to do this, I'm just making a suggestion that I think 
might help long term maintainability.

My 0.02$

Daniel

Jeff McKenna wrote:
> Hello dev team,
> 
> I about to dive into some funded work to create a MapServer 
> 'downloadable user's manual', to be in pdf format.  I am thinking of 
> making a glossy version of the great work already done by David Fawcett 
> and Perry in the New Users manual and the MapServer 5.0 Tutorial 
> respectively, and of course pointing to the existing howtos/references. 
>   Below are some topics for the table of contents, please let me know if 
> you think something is missing or if I should change my focus.
> 
> Table of Contents
> -----------------
> 
> Introduction
> Getting Started
>   - Installing
>   - Architecture of MapServer
> Preparing Data
>   - The .Map File
>   - Supported Formats
>   - Tips and Tricks
>   - Factors Affecting Performance
> Building a MapServer Application
>   - Flavors
>   - Example Code
> Community
>   - History of MapServer
>   - Project Steering Committee
>   - Contributing
>   - Getting Help
>   - Conferences/Workshops
> Glossary
> 
> 
> -- 
> jeff
> 
>