[Qgis-community-team] Manual labour (get it?)

[Otto Dassau]

Hi Carson,

On Thu, 07 May 2009 23:57:51 +0100
Carson Farmer <carson.farmer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hey team,
> 
> I'd just like to check in with everyone on the manual team at this point 
> to find out where everyone is at. Have you finished/almost finished your 
> sections? Do you need some extra help with a few items?
> 
> I have been talking with Tim Sutton, and he will likely be releasing the 
> new version of QGIS sometime in the next day or two, and we would like 
> to release the two products (software and manual) at the same time if 
> possible.

great idea and thanks a lot for your great work!

> I'm new to all this, so I don't know the normal procedure at this stage 
> in terms of proof-reading etc... Otto? 

The normal procedure would be:

* Final revision, if the content is uptodate and the layout of the
  user_guide looks nice (do images fit with the text, pagebreaks, etc.).
* Check title, forward and adapt qgis_style.sty if necessary (version number,
  authors, ...) 
* Test, if the latex sources in trunk compile properly.    
* Test creating PDF, PS, and HTML output for (html won't work, we need to
  invest some time on this after this release).

> It would be nice if we could have 
> everyone have a quick look over the final manual one last time before we 
> decide to branch it and call for translations etc., and maybe get some 
> third party people to have a quick once over (that's what friends and 
> family are for right...?).

Yes, if everybody is happy with their sections we can tag the release, create
a PDF, copy it to the osgeo server at http://download.osgeo.org/qgis/doc/manual/
and update the webpage links at qgis.org.

I started with a wiki page for the release procedure, but it is probably not
complete. http://www.qgis.org/wiki/index.php/Manual_Release_Preparation

After that we need to think about a good solution for branching the new
manual for translations, because it might make sense to create something like
diffs instead of providing the whole document - we will see.

I finished the updates of my sections on the ManualTasks wiki page plus the
Print Composer updates. For GRASS I only updated the GRASS Module list, because
I think nothing else happened here. I will have a last look over my sections and
later the final manual as well.

regards, 
 Otto

> Regards,
> 
> Carson
>