Re: [Firebird-docs] Monolith docs

[Paul V. <pa...@vi...>]

Hi Helen,

>> With the current setup, all docs in the manual module are chapters in
>> one big Firebird Doc. You can't build the docs separately. This may be
>> OK for an online HTML version, but not for the PDFs.
>>
>> Can we change this in an intelligent way? I.e. produce a PDF book set
>> where the books are separate files but can link to each other, just
>> like the IBPhoenix docset?

> fwiw, I did the IBPhoenix docs using Framemaker.  Doing the crosslinks
> in the two books was a *fun* exercise but the "stuff" behind it is huge.
>
> I don't have the XML version of Frame (toooo many $$$$$) but it might be
> worthwhile ploughing some of the PDF forums, e.g.
> http://www.pdfzone.com/discussions/ to see whether there is an open source
> linking tool you can use (PDFZone lists quite a lot of commercial ones).

I just had a look and this place is really _loaded_ with info. Will see
if I can find something of interest.

Making cross-document links in the XML source is no problem. It would be
ideal if the tools we use now (or other tools we can legally add to the
module) could produce separate PDF files without losing the cross-doc
links. Maybe they can already - I don't know. Until now this hasn't been
an issue because everything was One Doc. But we'll have to split it up -
as we add more docs, it also becomes more ridiculous to cram everything
(Intro to DocBook, Conversion Guide, Howtos, an everything else) into
one PDF file.

> So far, so good with the doc utility!  One tiny little point of English:
> "maturity" (not "matureness").  But I knew what you meant.  :-)

Thanks, I'll change it. But of course I checked my OED first before doing
so :-) : "matureness" exists too, it is in use since 1701. But it's very
rare, and IMO it also has a certain clumsiness (clumsity? ;-)) about it,
maybe because the English "-ness" is appended to the French "mature".
Anyway, "maturity" is the common word and much, much better.


Greetings,
Paul Vinkenoog