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Re: The invariant sections are not forbidden by DFSG



On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 02:52:41PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> An other example is a reference sheet to be printed on the front- and
> backside of a sheet of paper (autogenerated to always match the current
> version) that contains the most important commands, functions or
> whatever of the software that the manual documents.  For example a cheat
> sheet for GNU Emacs.  

It is not difficult to print two sheets - the invariant sections go on
the second sheet and FSF wins more popularity. :-)

> And I must say that I didn't get your reasoning why it wouldn't be
> necessary to include the invariant sections.  You talked about whether a
> book with 90% non-technical invariant stuff is still technical, but I
> missed how you want to explain that I may remove the invariant
> sections. 

Yes, the discussion was very large.

You can structure the man-pages in a way that makes every single
man-page to be only a part from a bigger document.  In order to fulfil
the requirements of the license you only need to include the invariant
sections in only one of your man-pages.  

When the document is distributed in HTML-format, we do exactly this -
each chapter can have its own short sized html-page and the invariant
sections are separated in their own html-pages.  We do not include the
invariant sections in all chapters of the document.

GFDL does not say what constitutes the whole document.  It is easy to
write in each of the man-pages that it is only a chapter from a bigger
text and to point to the man-page with table of contents.  Ofcourse
you will have to distribute the man-pages as a whole.

It is also possible to split the manual into files in plain-text
format.  As a matter of fact the info-format is almost plain-text and
can be read without info-reader.

Anton Zinoviev



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