[OLPC library] end-user doc update, 12/14/07

[adam hyde]

hi,

Pleased to meet you all. I'm very excited to be working on the OLPC
documentation and to be working to migrate the Simple Users guide to
FLOSS Manuals. 

I thought I should pip in with a 'hi' and mention that if anyone would
like to know anything about FLOSS Manuals, how the system works, what we
have in place in terms of workflow/toolchains and what our plans are
then please don't hesitate to ask. 

On Fri, 2007-12-14 at 22:41 -0600, Anne Gentle wrote:
> 
> Adam Hyde of FlossManuals.net and I met to talk about a migration path
> for the kids end-user doc content at
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Simplified_user_guide. They've just finished
> a lot of translation work so that we can also have multiple language
> versions of the simple user guide on the FM site and translators could
> work in a side-by-side view which is nice. The next steps are for me
> to re-arrange the content in Author-it. 
> into an outline closer to the structure that FM uses (Introduction,
> Installing, Interface, Using). Once I get the new structure to the
> content, Adam and I and anyone else who wants to pitch in can do copy
> and paste of the HTML into the FM pages. Adam's filling out the
> infrastructure on FM now here: 
> http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/OLPC_simple/WebHome
> 
> I'll send an email out to the list once we have the building blocks in
> place so that anyone can help. 
> 
> Seth - from Adam I learned that the formatting of the print versions
> out of the Floss Manuals wiki uses Scribus - http://www.scribus.net/.
> We should explore ways to leverage your layout work with the FM work. 

I believe I met Seth at Wikimania during his (excellent) talk on
participation and Wikipedia. Good to met you again! 

I'm very interested in what you have done the area of print preparation
Seth. It would be very nice if there is a possibility to combine tools
and ideas.

To prepare the print ready PDFs for Print in Demand we use Scribus.
Scribus has a nice internal scripter (python) and so we have written a
script to import a manual in HTML and lay it out with our styles etc. We
still need to tweak the content once it is in Scribus but with this
method I can produce a nicely designed print-ready manual in less than a
day. We are currently extending the script to make the process quicker,
and to work easily with different page layouts and styles.

kind regards,

adam




-- 
Adam Hyde
FLOSS Manuals

http://www.flossmanuals.net