Printable Manual - Help?

[rbelisle]

The formatting looks good, but I wanted something that would have the index, table of contents, etc... I DON'T like the idea of maintaining two 'sources' for information about the program. Hmmm, I'll play with that a little more and see what I come up with.

The big problem I see is that the WIKI is not 'printable' friendly and just printing out the contents doesn't give me what I am looking for which is really a manual that organizes things in a way that make sense in a printable format. The Wiki is great for browsing because you have links, go from page to page and 'assemble' information about what you are trying to do while you browse. Just printing the page out loses the power of the WIKI format.

I am beginning to think that I will still need to spend the time on a separate 'printable' version...

[ShiningDragon]

The formatting looks good, but I wanted something that would have the index, table of contents, etc... I DON'T like the idea of maintaining two 'sources' for information about the program. Hmmm, I'll play with that a little more and see what I come up with.

The big problem I see is that the WIKI is not 'printable' friendly and just printing out the contents doesn't give me what I am looking for which is really a manual that organizes things in a way that make sense in a printable format. The Wiki is great for browsing because you have links, go from page to page and 'assemble' information about what you are trying to do while you browse. Just printing the page out loses the power of the WIKI format.

I am beginning to think that I will still need to spend the time on a separate 'printable' version...

I fully understand, what you're meaning, but: The WiKi isn't fix, daily there are new entries, new guides and new informations. A fully printer-friendly Wiki should be built-up from the ground, otherwise the printed manual had to be actualised everytime a new entrie in the WiKi appear.

[rbelisle]

So are you suggesting a separate Wiki for the printable manual that anyone could contribute to?

[ShiningDragon]

So are you suggesting a separate Wiki for the printable manual that anyone could contribute to?

Not a seperate, that were to much work. But i think that it should be rebuild then to another appearance.

In other words: In this Moments the Plugin-Writers and Skinners are uploading very frequently their updates, the only hint for changes is the "AllRecentChanges" Link.

I could imagine, that a setup like a "Paper-Book" (Index, Pages) in another manner could work very well, for printing too.

So we could "split" the book into an Main-Part for GB-PVR itself and it's own Plugins and the Plugins, Skins after the mainpart in an AddOn.

One problem were left: At least one person has to check and update the index then.

[elite]

Would it not be better to add something like PublishPDF to the wiki - then I assume a hack could be made to generate a new PDF every time an edit is made, or if that is too resource intensive we could use crontab every so often (say every 24 hours)

[rbelisle]

Now we only need to get the WIKI updated to 2.1.1 (That's the version required for PDF util)

I think publishing to PDF would be great. Again, what I am concerned about is the format of the Wiki today. Most of the information is hyperlinked from one page to another. For example, the plugins page http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Config/Plugins

has links to all the plugin pages... makes sense in a Wiki. But for a manual it is not very useful. What you want is a description of the plugins and configuation for each...

I'm not convinced that the current WIKI structure would translate well to a printed manual.

[blader_se]

I too like printable stuff, so I agree with you guys.

Before I explain how to make it happen, take a look at the QuickStart/QuickStart page and it's printable version

If this is how we wan't it, then we "only" have to create a table-of-contents page, as I have done with QuickStart/QuickStart (please ignore the "remove highligtning" stuff), and write a list of the pages (called wiki trails btw) you wan't included, and add the "?action=publish&include=1" stuff to it.

Now, the drawback is that this list MUST be manually updated (and that's why I haven't even tried to do it for the Plugin/Plugin page, but just thrown in an autoupdating alphabetic index).

To make it a little easier, we can have a seperate list page in each category, and then include those pages in som sort of master table-of-contents page which we like to as "Printable version".

The PDFpublisher that rbelisle mention works in exactly the same way, but it can also send the compilated pages to a public server which converts it to pdf.

[rbelisle]

I really like the way this looks and was not aware that you could get that kind of 'printable' version that automatically links to the content pages. I think this would solved most/all possible issues I have (along with updating some of the Wiki pages). Then it's just a matter of playing around with things to get the right look/structure.

[blader_se]

Isn't the table-of-contents already there (on the left of the screen)? And if you want an index, there are ways of generating that automatically as well.

Well yes and no. You are correct that you can use the sidebar to print a huge part of the wiki. And it's also correct that you can generate an index automatically - but you can't (yet) use the automatically generated index as a wiki trail.

So the Sidebar skips those categories that have the automatically created indexes (i.e. the Plugin section) - but it does include the index page.