Those of you who subscribe to the OOo Documentation Project's
mailing list know that they are debating whether the source
documents for "official" user guides and other documentation
should be on the wiki, rather than having the source in ODT files
as it is now.
One side-topic is whether OOo needs docs in ODT and/or PDF at
all, if they are on the wiki. I am definitely in the group that
thinks documentation should be in several forms, to suit the
preferences and needs of different users. That is why I am in the
process of putting the OOoAuthors guides on the Docs Project wiki
(converting them from the ODTs).
However, I am not convinced that the wiki should be the source
documents for updates to the books we have written, mainly
because I want ODTs and PDFs (as well as wiki access).
I have yet to see an ODT generated from wiki source, so I have no
idea how much work there might be to clean it up. I do know there
is a lot of work involved in cleaning up wiki material generated
from ODT source (at least ODTs like ours, with layout complexity
and lots of graphics), though maintaining it after conversion is
quite easy and convenient for anyone with high-speed internet access.
We talked a bit about this before, but I don't recall us coming
to a conclusion. Here is some of that discussion, from 5-6 April
2007, topic: "Making OOoAuthors docs available in other forms".
Janet Swisher:
"If they are in wiki format, will users be able to update them,
or will they be write-protected? If users can update them, then
there will be two separate update paths -- through this project
and through the wiki. There would need to be a process for
incorporating wiki changes back into the source documents..."
Me:
"I would love to have the problem of a lot of people contributing
to the wiki, and it thus getting out of synch with the ODT files.
IMO that's a much better problem than the present situation of
having very few people contribute to the docs at all. Indeed, IF
it turned out that most contributions were going to the wiki,
then that might effectively become the "source documents", with
someone updating the ODT/PDF versions from the wiki, instead of
the other way around."
What do others think?
One possibility is to continue to *produce* our new material in
ODT as we have been doing, but *maintain* it on the wiki after
initial publication. Of course, that still leaves the problem of
generating updated ODTs from the wiki.
I note that Andrew, Drew and I all prefer to develop the Base
Guide in ODT. We haven't heard from other interested Base Guide
writers on this yet, though.
--Jean
- [authors] ODT or wiki as source for our books? (lon... Jean Hollis Weber
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