[OLPC library] OLPC-health

[Pascal Scheffers]

On 3 feb 2008, at 17:28, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>>
>> 1. InDesign
>
> It would be helpful if we could do this in Free Software. Have you
> looked at Scribus?

No, I haven't - the only reason we're working with InDesign is because  
the sources are InDesign, which I got from Hesperian by asking nicely.  
For new XO content, I would not choose InDesign, or any other paper- 
oriented design tool. I'll look into Scribus, is that a similar tool?  
I tend to use LaTeX or OOo for open content.

>> After Maja and I are done with 'Donde hay ...', we're likely to also
>> do the english edition (but not before aug-2008). The other books  
>> will
>> have to be worked on by other people.
>
> Yes, we need to recruit more people. I'm working on ways to keep track
> of our projects and the people working on them, and to get the word
> out about what we need. Mainly I'm asking people what they would
> suggest, and then suggesting that they work on it. ^_^ But it's rather
> chaotic right now.

Working on 'Donde hay...', it is very apparent that the work in  
InDesign is about 60 minutes per chapter, but then redoing all the  
tables-like layout in the chapters takes another 2-3 hours, if you're  
lucky. This job parallelizes nicely, though. Each chapter XHTML is a  
separate project.

It'd be really nice if we had a way to dish out work like that. Doing  
a single chapter is a manageable chunk of work, and the result is  
visible right away. I think it's fun to do, except for the part where  
it takes 100 hours to do the whole book if you have to do it alone.

If we can setup a team of people working on jobs like this, it'll be  
more fun and diverse for everyone.

- Pascal.