Hi Chris, Karl, and other PDL Book interested people: On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Chris Marshall <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Matt- > > How are things going with the PDL book "project" > as far as status, plans, working files, or other > information? Would setting up a git folder at > sf.net help with coordination and contributions?
A git folder would be a good idea :) Here were my thoughts on PDL Books and Tutorials - In order to write and edit PDL documentation, it would be good to have a simple format that everyone could edit easily and see it updated in a timely fashion, but that it could be exported to something nicer as a printable format in a PDF, such as the LaTeX output of the original PDL Book. To this end, I decided to try rewriting the PDL Book in POD. I've found out that this works surprisingly well, because: 1) Writing in POD means that it is completely available and searchable in the PDL help system 2) There's no maintaining a separate documentation repository (it lives with PDL) 3) It can be cross-linked in with the PDL core documentation To test this out, I converted the PDL Book Chapter 3, which is image intensive chapters in the book, in order to see what the output would be like in HTML and PDF. The original POD documentation: http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~kenworthy/pdlpod/PDL.Tut.PGPLOT/PDL.Tut.PGPLOT.pod Converted to HTML: http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~kenworthy/pdlpod/PDL.Tut.PGPLOT/PDL.Tut.PGPLOT.html ....and exported as PDF: http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~kenworthy/pdlpod/PDL.Tut.PGPLOT/test.pdf So, what does this mean? Ideally, it would be good to see a PDL Book, a set of PDL Tutorials and a PDL Reference (mostly made up of the PDL function documentation) which factor in the hard work done on the earlier separate texts, so that we can all point new users to a given help page from within PDL. The main work is doing the control code mangling, the conversion of the images to PNG and checking that the new texts scan well. I can take the lead on organisation, but I don't have that much time to do conversions all by myself - if two or three people are willing to work on converting a chapter at a time, we could pull something together for a December/January release. Okay, have a look at the PDF if nothing else, and let me know what you think. Cheers, Matt -- Matthew Kenworthy / Assistant Professor / Leiden Observatory Niels Bohrweg 2 (#463) / P.O. Box 9513 / 2300 RA Leiden / NL _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
