Re: [Flightgear-devel] Links for new FlightGear pilots

[Martin S. <Mar...@mg...>]

Hi Joerg, Stuart, others,
I'll just add a few ideas, as most of the relevant stuff has already
been said.

Jörg Emmerich wrote:

> "joacher@gm.." now proposed the link to "www.lyx.org" and I had a short
> look:
> - seems you can even import HTML into that system

Personally I doubt that importing HTML is worth the effort, and I'll
try to let you know, why  :-)

Upon importing whichever structured format, LyX (or whichever
processor) will try to make a sense out of the current formatting and
in most cases you'll have to fine-read the output anyway in order to
make it fit the style of the current "getstart" manual.  Thus, instead
of spending effort on removing obsolete formatting from the import, it
would be easier just to dump the HTML as plain text and add LaTeX
formatting only where appropriate.
BTW, in order to import HTML, LyX relies on having "htmltolatex"
installed, which probably isn't the case on every system/distro which
has LaX available.

> So I could imagine to structure like:
> 1) Start as is

Much of the structure of The Manual was  designed when pre-built
packages were a rare species and you had to accustom with different
graphics card drivers.  Stuart did a great job cleaning up in order to
keep up with recent changes, but I have to admit there's always a lot
to improve

> Did I shock you now ???

No  :-)

> I am not a Profi on that: But is that still a problem with todays PC's,
> that are running FlightGear? I thought the standard allowable
> transmission size today is about 20 MB.

I still think we should not stress people's sympathy by growing the PDF
too large.  If the current setup grows too large, there'll be the
option to split the PDF into different files and just have people start
with the intro and the summary.  Internal HTML symlinks will do the
take care about referncing the remaining parts.

[... GPL ...]
> My concerns result out of the many discussions in the forums about our
> competitors that earn money with what we are doing.

Everything in FlightGear, the software and the data directory you use
is distributed under an OpenSource license ((L)GPL).  This is the
foundation of the entire project and therefore I think it's just a
logical consequence to distributing The Manual under the same license.

> Just let me beg for one last wish: Please spend that now "getstart" at
> least a little cosmetic treatment! Somehow I do not believe that the
> pictures shown in it represent todays FlightGears possibilities,

Agreed ! In fact, it's up to everyone here to create and submit better
images, screenshots.  Basically this is a "the communit gets what they
deserve"-situation  ;-)

Cheers,
	Martin.
-- 
 Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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