Toby Butzon wrote:
> With all due respect, I don't see why that would be beneficial. I
> personally like browsing the manual online; it's searchable, it's
> up-to-date, and it's well organized.
> Hiring a publishing company, etc., requires an investment of time and
> money....
> > David Elrom wrote:
> > I think the PHP manual should be published and sold for no profit...
> > (sold for the price of making the book...)
Why? It's more portable, and low bandwidth, to have it on paper.... if
somebody really wants an offline, printed, copy, they can simply grab
the PDF version, and print it out themselves, or take it to an
AlphaGraphics or Kinkos/instyPrints/KwikKopy/whatever and have them print
out and bind a copy, for minimal personal costs. It's only 1041 pages,
so it should be less than the $50+ USD of the average tech manual.
Since I'm heavily entrenched in there (AG, my biggest client for PHP
consulting work), I've actually debated making this into something they
can sell/advertise their services with, as they already do this kind
of work for some other large documents with worldwide readership, but
I've never really gotten that far with the idea (which also works quite
well for other open-source manuals, print-on-demand is a very good
thing for documentation that changes frequently).... anybody know who
the folks at sourceforge are?
Anyways....
Until such a system gets built, most competant "business-documents
companies" can run these things fairly cheap, and in most cases, for less
cost than a decent O'Reilly/Wrox/whomever book would cost to buy. The
only problems I've seen so far with the PDF manual are high characters
(Stig's name, for example. ;-) ).
Which also introduces the questions:
1. What would it take to get the PDF versions into other languages
besides english?
2. Why isn't the PDF version being served on a page-by-page basis, as
well as one big file? It sure would be nice to only put together
a printed manual of the pages you want (i.e, If you're only using
MySQL, it would save a lot of paper if you didn't print the Oracle,
Postgres, Ovrimos, etc. sections.)
-Ronabop
--
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