kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 9/22/2011 6:04 AM, fabrizio wrote:
> Hello,
> Now that the new 26pth kicad icons are basically finished (I'll maybe
> send reviews of some of them if necessary) I'd like to bring up the
> topic of documentation.
> 
> As far as I understand Kicad has some manuals written in OpenOffice
> and a one step by step tutorial. On top of that there are the
> translations of them, all done in OpenOffice.
> 
> Before the new face-lifted kicad gets released, these manuals need to
> be updated and maybe reviewed. this might suggest that we could choose
> a different documentation format for kicad (web-based, online
> wiki-based, html documentation accessible via the kicad menu,
> restructured text, etc.).

How do we get the documents from the wiki into PDF (the format supported by
Kicad) for the binary distributions that most users will install?  The user
manuals are currently kept in a separate repo so that documentation
contributors do not need access to the source repo and that some level of
change control is maintained.  This prevents anybody from dumping anything into
the documentation and allows for changes to easily be rolled back.  I have no
preference over the format used for generating the documentation.  There are
plenty of good alternatives available.  I personally will continue to generate
the file format documentation in ODF format.  If someone wants to translate it
into some other format, I'm OK with that.

> 
> What are the options out there? What do you think we should do about
> it? Who would be interested in working on it?
> 
> Just as term of comparison, here:
> http://inkscape.org/doc/index.php
> http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/index.php
> you can find the only (on-line) documentation available of probably
> one of the best open-source graphical tool.
> 
> in case of inkscape, documentation is online and tutorials are in the
> inkscape native format.

I'm not a big fan of on-line only documentation.  There are times when there is
no internet connection available and you need access to the documentation.

Wayne

> 
> Regards
> Fabrizio
> 
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