On Sat, Aug 16, 2014 at 2:01 PM, Norman Gray <nor...@astro.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
> Greetings. > > Some way up this thread, I said: > > On 2014 Aug 14, at 11:21, Norman Gray <nor...@astro.gla.ac.uk> wrote: > > > On 2014 Aug 14, at 01:10, Worik Stanton <worik.stan...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > >> Suggestion: Package the release notes, FAQ and some other documentation > >> into a PDF and sell that at the same price as the CD, from the same > >> place. I'd buy that. It would be better quality than the (often) crap > >> O'Reilly sell, and I buy that. > > > > This is potentially quite a good idea. > > > > The T-shirts and CDs exist because (a) some people find them useful in > themselves, and (b) some people prefer or find it more convenient to buy a > physical thing they don't intend to use, as a means of making an indirect > donation to the project. This of course is discussed at length in the rest > of this thread. > > > > There's precedent for such a physical book being sellable. The Python > Reference Manual [1] is a dead-tree version of the language and library > description also available for free at [2]. There's clearly some story > about the various reasons why people buy that, but it's clear that at least > some do. I have considered doing so myself -- a paper document is superior > to an on-screen one in some circumstances -- but in the end found it more > convenient to print out selected sections of the downloaded PDF. > > > > Places like lulu.com will put a PDF on paper for you and sell/ship the > result. I've no idea of the economic details of that, or alternatives to > lulu, but such services do exist. > > > > I'm not making any promises here, but given mild encouragement I'd be > very willing to take a look at how complicated it would be to turn the > existing text or texts into a readable PDF (I've done this sort of thing > before, and could probably do it fairly efficiently). > > After posting that, I received some ... non-discouragement off-list, > and that's enough for me. > > At <http://nxg.me.uk/temp/openbsd-faq-suggestion/> you will find, > for your delectation and delight: > > * A PDF of sections 1--5 of the FAQ; > * An HTML version of this; > * A tarball containing the source of the scripts which generate these > from XML originals. > > The idea of the PDF is that it's something which could potentially > be sold on dead trees (which might be useful/attractive for the > reasons above). > > To do this, I took the HTML versions of the FAQ sections, and > normalised them into regular XHTML (which makes them processable > into other forms). With that done, it was straightforward to > transform the result into both HTML for presentation, and into LaTeX > for further transformation into PDF. This depends on the xsltproc > package, and obviously on LaTeX. > > The HTML target does things like adding in consistent structuring, > generating tables of contents, ensuring that internal cross-references > are consistent, and so on. The results should be identical in content, > and pretty similar in appearance, to the online versions. > > The normalisation of the contents consisted in large part of > regularising away various bits of cruft used for layout (for example > <blockquote> and <table> elements (eek!) around <pre>, which are > fiddly to manage and are inevitably inconsistent across the document), > making "..." and '...' consistent, and a couple of other things > discussed in the README in the tarball. The README also contains > some notes on the lightweight structuring added to the source files. > > It would be pretty straightforward to generate a .txt FAQ from these > same sources (via *roff). > > The results here aren't very pretty -- and obviously I've only done > the first five sections -- but they're respectable and should show > the idea. > > Even if the PDF idea isn't taken up, this is potentially an alternative > way to generate the HTML files, in contrast to hand-editing > disconnected .html files. > > I like the idea of the 'Good Idea Fairy'! This one comes with product. > > Best wishes, > > Norman > > > -- > Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk > SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK > > in the glorious third millemium are usb key as cheap as cd printing ? -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\
