Jean T. Anderson wrote:
Good question. I think if it looks good to them, then they wouldn't download the docs to build. In the past I always shunned away from doc building and just wanted to see the final output. Although that was back a few years before some of this cooler stuff was around.scott hutinger wrote:
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One question I haven't asked about pdf output. What is the default output in terms of fonts/styles etc for docs? Does IBM have a standard they use, or is it related to something else? I'm certain that some type of output specs exist that have been found to create good output. I haven't looked around for this information, as I think it would take a while to find good information on this. I would guess that we might need to find font(s) that everyone can build the docs with.
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What do the users want? Do folks want to download the DITAs and build PDFs themselves? Or download the built PDFs?
Also, don't forget the includes are OS dependant \ != / or a \ does not work when a / is wanted. So unless some other option I don't know about exists, then a / and \ version would need to be downloaded. I would think this issue would have caused enough problems that some flag exists to fix this.
A note about fonts. I have tried looking at the output getstart.pdf on a coupld different machines and os's. It seems on all but one machine, helvetica was replaced by Arial of some type. This is a bit confusing, as the fop site seems to say that helvetica is the base font that everything has. I'll have to look on a OS X machine that was displaying some other docs I transformed yestereday (not dita) and replaced helvitica with Arial; it looked really bad.
I'm going to hazard a guess that a few might want to download and build themselves and most will want to download the already built PDF, but I could be wrong. We need feedback from the community.Thanks for bring that up. You might want to have this on the website (DERBY-79) so others can input without the need to search.
DERBY-79 (http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/DERBY-79) might be a good starting point for tracking requirements as they get nailed down. It doesn't specify fonts/styles ... at least not yet!
I'm not quite sure how the best way to handle this is. Should we post a "[doc] What do you want the PDF format for manuals to be?" to derby-dev? or to derby-user? then report results back to derby-dev? or record results in DERBY-79?A good idea, but I think the font issues need to be investigated a bit. I'll try to get some more information on the helvetica replacement. Although on all but one machine, the output looked good with the font replacement.
scott
I'm not trying to overly complicate it. I'm just wondering what the best way is to hear from the most users in the community.
-jean
