Since the Blender Summer of Docs is going to be focused on print style documents only I suggest to get some sort of unfied layout style up and running. It is of course Ton's call what format we should use and deliver, but I would like to suggest the OpenOffice Writer format (.sxw V.1.1, as it's OS X compliant).
I hereby offer to design and document a professional ready-made OpenOffice template (Pageformat A4) complete with licensed fonts that can serve as the foundation for all submitions to the Blender Summer of Docs.
Unfied Layout Style
Moderators: jesterKing, stiv
Unfied Layout Style
A Gimp/PS debate is pointless. A Blender/LW debate is interesting.
Probably a good idea at least!
1) Make sure there's enough border to print to "US letter" size as well though (8.5"x11").
2) The one question I would have about using OO as the tool, is that it would be really nice to have the ability to output to various destinations, including the web/HTML. The HTML output of OO doesn't seem very good to me. I don't know if it validates or not, but it seemed very bulky. Given that OO is XML-based, hopefully it would be possible to send the information to a knowledgebase/database as well.
There was a Word-based documentation tool (mostly templates & macros) which I remember seeing several years ago that was really good in terms of making things easy to understand. Good technical documentation is different than good general writing, hopefully some good writers can do this! If I can find any current info about those techniques, I'll post it.
1) Make sure there's enough border to print to "US letter" size as well though (8.5"x11").
2) The one question I would have about using OO as the tool, is that it would be really nice to have the ability to output to various destinations, including the web/HTML. The HTML output of OO doesn't seem very good to me. I don't know if it validates or not, but it seemed very bulky. Given that OO is XML-based, hopefully it would be possible to send the information to a knowledgebase/database as well.
There was a Word-based documentation tool (mostly templates & macros) which I remember seeing several years ago that was really good in terms of making things easy to understand. Good technical documentation is different than good general writing, hopefully some good writers can do this! If I can find any current info about those techniques, I'll post it.
wiki to PDF
If you take alook at the front page of the wiki, there is a link to "wiki to PDF". Currantly we are looking at being able to translate directly from wiki into a manuel. there are some challenges like image quality, but let wait for the deves to get the converter sorted 