Re: CD edition

[Stein Gjoen <sgjoen@mail.nyx.net>]

Gregory Leblanc wrote:

[snip]

> I think our CD needs to contain 4 formats, SGML, HTML, plain text, and PDF.

The SGML might not be that useful for people who just wishes to check
out Linux to see what it is like. In fact SGML might confuse those who
are not familiar with the acronym soup we in the LDP live with.
Therefore I would suggest that for a joint publication such as DemoLinux
we drop the SGML alltogether if possible and for a dedicated publication
store these as a bzip2 compressed archive of files (sgml.tar.bz2) .

> PDF is going to be the best thing for the "Windows" world, HTML is excelent
> for people already in Linux with a GUI running.  Text, although it lacks
> some features like hyperlinks etc will be the best format for people using a
> character based display terminal (DOS, Linux console, serial terminals,

Let us not forget Lynx does render HTML reasonably well on text only
consoles. There is another text only mode browser too, Links I think
it is called. If Dos and Windows users are part of the target group
we should consider bundling a free open source text mode browser if
possible.

Plain ascii does have its uses, I use it for searching with grep.

> etc).  The SGML there is so that if somebody wants to see how our documents
> look before they become something else, they can.  This will also help
> people if they decide that they want to try writing a document.  I don't

A demofile with SGML would be sufficient for that, bundling huge
SGML files sound like an excellent way of scaring off potential
contributors. We need to consider our audience carefully and keep
the pedagogic aspects in mind. The HOWTO-HOWTO together with the
sample files from SGMLTools should be a sufficient basis for
demonstrating the way the documents are created.

> know if the best way to accomplish this is with a copy of the website, or
> some other means.
>         Greg

I suggest we think out the directory structure and make it navigable
using index.html files for each directory. There is also an older
standard using "00-contents" (I think it was) files that makes
ascii tool navigation possible. I believe even some FTP tools use
these files.

For the longer term I suggest we make tools for creating such
distributions on demand, making it possible to select/deselct

o specific formats
 - SGML
 - HTML (split or nosplit)
 - ascii (plain or with backspacing)
 - PDF
 - PostScrips (A4/letter/universal)
 - NetHelp (ref http://www.nyx.net/~sgjoen/home.html )

o specific compression/bundling
 - none
 - ZIP (more or less the standard for DOS/Windows)
 - RAR (a better method but less common standard for DOS/Windows)
 - tar
 - gzip
 - bzip2 (better than gzip but less common)

o specific components
 - guides
 - HOWTOs
 - FAQs
 - zines
 - auxilliary docs such as RFC etc

o specific packaging for download/installation
 - RPM
 - deb
 - tar
 - ZIP

It should be obvious from the above that great space savings can
be made by knowing your audience and that the combinations are
numerous. A clever shell or perl script should be used as the
index.html and contents files will have to be modified with the
choices made.

This way we can quickly generate a distribution for inclusion
with distributions such as DemoLinux, CDs bundled with magazines,
LPD stands at exhibitions and more.


Regards,
   Stein Gjoen


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