Re: Hardcopy documentation
In message <0.a8b0625.25361078@aol.com> you wrote:
>My name is Dave Belan and work for Lynx Communications which is a printer of
>software documentation. Lynx has been printing, for various companies, Linux
>user and reference manuals. We recently completed "The Complete Reference"
>manual and "The Best of Linux Distributions." I would like to work with you
>and your organization of any future printed documentation projects. Please
>let me know if printed manuals are something that you plan to offer or are
>they going to be offered as web downloads. Thank you for your time.
Dave, if you are referring to Debian documentation, then I can
safely tell you that we do have the capability to produce pretty
high-quality PS or PDF files which at least get you close to being
print ready.
Since the vast majority of Debian documentation is encoded as SGML,
it's a pretty easy thing to produce postscript from it.
Let's start with the installation manual -- that is available
at http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/ , printable, HTML, and
ASCII. One tricky thing there is that the manual varies a little
for each architecture -- since a user only cares about one architecture,
we don't currently have a way to have a single version with bracketed
per-architecture notes.
The other manuals are not available on the web in printable form
at this time, but they are available in printable form in
packages. SGML source is available as anonymous CVS as
described at http://www.debian.org/~elphick/ddp/ . This can be used
to build PostScript or PDF or DVI or whathaveyou.
I don't know what other needs you have -- I'd certainly be willing
to try to marshal resources to meet them given some "acts of faith"
from Lynx Communication. I.e., submitting patches/corrections of
documentation to <debian-doc@lists.debian.org>, helping maintain
the web pages, improving the printable output of the debiandoc-sgml,
or contributing to any tools you guys use which would be useful to the
group, etc. I only say this because in the past I've donated non-trivial
amounts of effort towards for-profit re-distributors of Debian, who
then subsequently took no efforts to back-port improvements back
to Debian. Based on being bitten that way, I leave it to the
for-profits to make the first move. But whether or not you do that,
you are always free to "use the source" on your own in any way which
you see fit and the licensing (very open!) allows.
Anyhow, best of luck.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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