Re: Is there a need for a hard copy OpenBSD documentation project?

[Fredrik Henbjork <frehe491@student.liu.se>]

Luke Seubert <lseubert@radix.net> wrote:
 
> For my part, I am tentatively interested in working on: design and layout of
> the docs; developing an efficient updating scheme; and printing them up. I
> am not interested in retail distribution - there are many others who could
> do this very well. 

The updating issue is pretty interesting...

> That said, I might not be the right person to do this.
> I am pretty much a *nix newbie, and the OpenBSD community may feel that
> someone well versed in the OS should do this sort of work.  I don't know.
> However, I do have some amateur experience doing design and layout work of
> this sort and getting it printed up, so that helps.
> 
> Your proposal to use Python to convert all the docs into SGML/XML and from
> there to convert to Postscript/pdf hardcopy using LaTex sounds very good.  I
> appreciate the offer, tentative offer I should say :-)  While I know what
> Python and LaTex are, I have minimal experience with them so your efforts
> would be a great help.
> 
> Let me add some additional thoughts and questions though.  Let's say that
> the project works out, and a master XML electronic version of the docs is
> created, and a hard copy is published with Postscript/pdf.  Now, would we
> also want to publish a CD with the XML and Postscript docs and bundle it
> with the hard copy?  This would allow users to easily publish their own
> customized copies of the docs as needed. Maybe a company would like to have
> one master hard copy of all the docs for occasional reference, but then
> publish their own select parts of the hard copy for daily use.

There is also the copyright issue, I don't know under what licenses the
different parts of the OpenBSD documentation is. I suppose a lot of it
is under the BSD-license, but this has to be checked.
 
> What about adding a search engine to this CD electronic copy of the hard
> copy documentation?  Yes, I know that this duplicates the search
> capabilities on the OpenBSD website, and the FAQ, and the apropos function
> from the CLI; but maybe folks would like to be able to search the complete
> hard copy version of the docs electronically.  This would be an especially
> useful feature if the hard copy documentation project grew beyond just
> duplicating the man pages, FAQ, and all the other docs for OpenBSD; and
> eventually included a SysAdmin manual, various articles, HowTos, history,
> etc.
 
I have pretty little spare time for the moment, but I will start to
look at what kind of SGML/XML-template(s) would be suitable. I am
personally in favor of using XML, but I really need to study the
template issue in more detail.

-- 
Fredrik Henbjork

http://o112.ryd.student.liu.se