Good points Adam. A couple of related comments:
On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 8:22 PM, Adam Tindale
Upon further investigation there are a few other downsides to FLOSS manuals: There is no provision for sections, just chapters
Judging from the existing manuals (looking at the bypassing internet censorship one as an example), although the chapter is the main unit, it looks like subheadings are taken into account too, at least when generating PDF indexes.
The document is created with HTML so layout possibilities are limited not only by that markup but what the site is able to translate to PDF
True. It may not be possible to get a 1-to-1 formatting transfer from how the current manual is.
The PDFs don't look very good. CSS editing is possible but that would probably require one person doing that for most of the day
Although the initial styling work would be a pain, it might only be necessary to do it once. I'm sure I'm not the only one here, but I'm fairly handy with CSS (though I'm no designer or typesetter) and wouldn't mind smartening it up with some rules in case better qualified users aren't available.
The filenames of the downloaded items seems to be fixed to something I don't like
Yeah the filenames of the exported PDFs are ugly, and non-descriptive, which is a shame. Of course the exports that are destined for distribution would get renamed.
The file sizes of the PDFs are huge
The internet censorship manual is around 8Mb, but I noticed it has lots of images, which I imagine are making it heavier.
Making a title page doesn't seem as easy as it should be
Agreed.
It will take some time to get our current manual into their site to start changing it
Yes. Perhaps this could go relatively quickly if its a task we could split among several people.
December 16th is in my calendar, is it in yours?
It is.