Selezen wrote:Hmm...trouble is that I have used Word to create a nice border to the pages that wraps over onto facing pages
See my last message on the possibilty that a conversion to OO writer will solve it. Don't switch to HTML on account of me!
My objection to having Word .doc files in the SVN repo are:
- it drags an expensive (approx £350) proprietary requirement to anyone wanting to contribute to documentation, and MS Office is not available for Linux anyway (and I suspect few Ooliters who use Mac OS X have MS Office either).
- it cannot be automated to generate PDFs as part of the build process (a real killer as this makes new releases *a lot* more effort as several manual steps will be needed each time a full release is made).
The solutions consist of the following choices:
- Use HTML (not desriable for the reasons you outline so we'll throw that one out straight away).
- Store PDFs in the SVN tree (not desirable because then you have no source version control)
- When you're done, convert it to OpenOffice SXW for storage in SVN.
No, don't change it to HTML if it'll destroy the formatting. If you send me what you have now I can tell you how it looks in OpenOffice. Chances are it'll work in OpenOffice just fine and it'll all be a non-event. If it can, that's the ideal solution because:
- OpenOffice is free, so few barriers to entry
- OpenOffice runs on both platforms that currently run Oolite properly
- OpenOffice files can be converted by that Python tool as part of the build process to PDF - automatically, without needing OpenOffice to actually be installed on the build machine.
In the event it cannot be converted, well, then we'll just store the PDFs in the doc directory on SVN. It won't be ideal from the source code versioning standpoint, but the build process can simply copy the PDFs to the right location when building the final full package.