[reportlab-users] manual proposal

[Andy Robinson]

2008/10/20 adam hyde <adam at flossmanuals.net>:

> however the manuals would be hosted on the flossmanuals site as that is

> the toolset and the focus of the community.

>

> if you want the manuals on your own server then it would be best to go

> with the mediawiki option.


We've discussed this internally and decided that we really want to keep
our documentation in our repository.  Right now it can all be built and
kept in sync with the code, and we already had plans to make this
better, and to put it up in HTML and allow comments and so on using
a Django-powered site we are building.

Also, we want to improve the PDF output to showcase more advanced
features that only we have - for example, the first place anyone is likely
to see a really easy-to-use table of contents widget should be in our
manuals, as we'll be needing it.  This will let folks like you, MediaWiki and
others pick up new features from us easily in future.

Tools are not the problem.  We'd much rather hack on tools than
try to rewrite tutorial content - just like everyone else here ;-)  I am
also not convinced yet that the "community" would produce coherently
edited manuals.  Aiming for the odd rewritten section and a mechanism
to collect and tag snippets and sample scripts (like ActiveState or
DjangoSnippets) seems more realistic to me, and that's where we
hope to be in 3 months time.

Many thanks for the offers of help, though, and I wish you the best.
We're also hoping to put up some pages of projects using ReportLab,
and both FLOSSManuals and MediaWiki are great examples.


- Andy