My experience in writing user manuals has only been for software written
by me, and probably 1/100th of the complexity and scope of the pdf
project. I do have experience (long ago) using TeX and LaTeX, and have
at least skimmed the Texinfo book, which I have. So I will certainly
need help. Is there any sort of draft already started? Or, barring that,
is there an example the team considers particularly good that I could
look to for guidance? Would I be working on it alone or with other authors?
I an an engineer by training, but not a software engineer. I have
written C programs but for the most part only for my own use. So if I am
required to read and understand the code in fine detail, that may be a
problem.
As far as the license and copyright, that's no problem. I am a member of
FSF and want to contribute to the free software community in some useful
way.
Russ Jones <[email protected]>
[email protected] wrote:
I am interested in helping with documentation for this important
project. I have quite a bit of technical writing experience
including writing software documentation, but am a complete newbie
to participation in a Free Software project. I tried to peruse the
mailing list archive tonight with no success - perhaps the server
is down right now. Please let me know how I can engage
constructively, and I will try to do so without being more trouble
than I'm worth.
Are you experienced in writing user manuals? I think that it would be
interesting to start writing the user manual for the library, for at
least two reasons:
1. The Reference Manual (doc/gnupdf.texi) is not a good document to
learn how to use the library. It is getting quite big, and it will
be huge when completed. The refman is also strictly following the
layered structure of the library, without looking into pedagogic
considerations.
2. The writing of the manual will surely identify a lot of non evident
use cases, that would be invaluable to identify flaws in the public
APIs described by the refman.
As general requirements, the manual would have to be written in
Texinfo, licensed with GFDL, and its copyright transferred to the Free
Software Foundation.
--
Jose E. Marchesi <[email protected]>
http://www.jemarch.net
GNU Project http://www.gnu.org
