EMC documentation

[Ray <rehenry-at-up.net>]

List

I want to give you a brief background on the linuxcnc.org/handbook and then 
ask for your help. 

Long ago, in computer terms, someone proposed an electronic cookbook that 
would tell folk how to setup and apply the EMC to mills and such.  Within a 
couple of days, cookbook got changed to handbook and Dan Falck rented  
LinuxCNC.org and com.  Steve Stallings was nice enough to locate them on his 
server.

We set up a repository on OpenAvenue and a few signed up to help.  OpenAvenue 
went the way of several other dot coms and we began setting up directories 
and passwords for anyone who wanted to contribute by ftp directly to the 
linuxcnc.org site.  Many times though I feel like I have been a bottleneck to 
development of the EMC documentation and would like to set up a new 
repository so that any can get full access to writing, editing, and 
translating.

My thought now is to add a doc directory to sourceforge at the same level as 
the emc and the rcslib.  Below that would be a handbook directory containing 
all of the marked up and conformed, ready and nearly ready to publish, 
document files.    A tempdoc directory would hold any format and content that 
needs to be placed in the handbook but is not in proper markup.  Below these, 
we could easily create language specific versions, or allow language specific 
tags within a single file.

Current copies of the published versions, html, pdf, etc would be available 
on the linuxcnc.org site or people could get the latest versions directly 
from the sourceforge repository.

I've been talking with Henkka, the FAQ coordinator, for a while about a 
format.  We sorta settled on DocBook SGML.  Below is a post from Henkka 
describing what he has accomplished in this direction with the FAQ.  

If you have any time that you can spare, would you follow the link at the end 
of his post, dig around a bit, and comment back to the list about what you 
think.

Thanks for your time.

Ray


----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: DocBook
Date: 06 Jan 2002 20:53:44 +0200
From: Henry Palonen <h-at-yty.net>
To: rehenry-at-up.net

Ray,

I changed FAQ to SGML (DocBook). You can look at it in [1], because I
didn't get to linuxcnc.org right now. Convertion was quite painless
operation with LyX. I just edited it in LyX with Document settings as
"DocBook" (From menu: Layout->Document->Class->SGML (DocBook book) ).
Then I outputted DocBook SGML file (File->Export->DocBook).

Then I changed to console and made a small script:

----
#!/bin/sh
db2html faq.sgml
db2ps faq.sgml
db2pdf faq.sgml
db2rtf faq.sgml
----

So that produced directory "faq" where all HTML-files are. And then it
produced faq.ps, faq.pdf and faq.rtf. I tought that pdf and rtf formats
are good for Windows users since they can easily print those in any
machine. And because it's not much trouble making them, why not make
them ;-)

So, all in all, DocBook seems to fit fine to this project.

Best regards,

Henkka

[1] http://www.yty.net/cnc/faq/faq/book1.html

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