[Live-demo] Documentation

[Hamish]

Cameron wrote:
> However, it seems that the formatting doesn't come out very well.
> This may need some tweaking.


Abiword is a neat tool*, but formatting issues are fundamentally always going to
be the case unless a structured document format is used. Choice of traditional
word processor isn't going to make any difference.

If you want an editor which does the right thing, but is still somewhat familiar
to openoffice/Words users, then LyX is it.

[*] tip o'the day: What abiword does for format conversions on the command line,
Inkscape also does for SVG to EPS graphics needs. very handy!


For a flat-ASCII format, upon reflection Mediawiki markup will be a better choice
than reStructured Text (which is nice, but perhaps yet-another thing to learn).

Asking people to learn Wiki markup should not be so great a request**, we could
primarily use our mediawiki instance as the docs home.  Mediawiki allows
Special:Export which outputs it as simple XML which can then be fed to a wide
assortment of filters to PDF, html, etc. Also, by adding "&printable=yes" to the
wiki page URL you get a "printer friendly" version with the side panels etc
stripped away; so in that way the install_docs.sh script could pull the HTML
version directly from the web. (as has already started to happen)  For offline
users it would be nice to ship copies of the wiki "how to install" pages on-disc
too.

printer friendly version example:
 http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php?title=Live_GIS_Disc_Quick_Start&printable=yes

I imagine there are some more simple wiki controls lurking which will keep the
hyperlinks unexpanded, etc., and just show the main document frame in pretty-
form. If not, we could write a HTML page template that simply added a header
and footer and floated a frame containing the printable html version mid-page.


as for mediawiki->PDF, well 178 hits, pick one:
  http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=pdf&go=Go

this one in particular looks nice:
  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PDF_Writer

example output using Wikipedia's entry for "Solar system":
  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_system_final.pdf



[**] educators will have at least used wikipedia so it shouldn't be that scary
an interface for them. also as educators IMO they should be willing to learn this
tech so they can teach it/with it. it's not like we'd be asking them to use vi. Wiki
editing is a highly-reusable skill, and also adds to our helper pool for the
administrative wiki side of the project. ;)


> Hamish raised concerns about storing binary files in svn.
> How serious is this concern.

- once something is checked into SVN, it never leaves. So binary files which
change frequently chew up vast amounts of SVN server space even if the trunk
file is not that big. Even minor typo fixes could mean an entire new copy of
the file needs to be permanently added to the DB. For text files AFAIU
internally it stores version diffs, and branches and tag clones are entirely
virtual. So SVN is highly efficient for text files, but a bloated mess for
binary files.
Currently the .odt files are so tiny that the DB bloat factor isn't an issue.
Once annotated screenshots begin to be added to them it gets bad though.

- using binary files pretty much completely kills any efficient peer review,
which in turn also harms group collaboration. (typos, bug fixes, minor updates,
etc don't flow in from the casual bystanders checking out the diffs in svn
or the trac's timeline)


> I think our primary requirement is that we make documentation writing
> (which includes images) easy to create, which means we need to move
> away from using HTML as our source format.

I am all for low barriers to entry, but I don't want to believe that <b>
for bold and <p> for paragraph break is really that hard for the average
voter to pick up. The trick is to just get people to try :). IMO fear of
the unknown is a bigger hurdle than the learning curve in this situation.
... and of course the world would be a better place if everyone went through
the 15 minute LyX tutorial as it doesn't take long to see how amazing it is. :-)


but for today's vote wrt long-term strategy I'll get behind Wikimedia +
Extension:PDF_Writer and whatever &printable=yes+frame, Htmlbook, or simple
sed script brute-chop method gives us nice HTML. 


Hamish