[chuck-users] FLOSS (user editable) manual for ChucK

[Tomasz Kaye's brain]

Good points Adam. A couple of related comments:

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 8:22 PM, Adam Tindale <adamtindale at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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.