Hello, As you probably know, I work on the documentation in order to provide Cinelerra-CV users with a CV-specific documentation. Nowadays information and tips about Cinelerra is scattered all over the Internet: - the "official" Secrets of Cinelerra manual - Alex's TWiki - this mailing-list - the #cinelerra IRC channel - some other places on the internet
Cinelerra "ships" with the very good Secrets of Cinelerra manual written by Heroine Virtual Ltd. It's the cinelerra.texi file available in the hvirtual/doc directory. Unfortunately, that texinfo file cannot be converted to a nice HTML page. Moreover, it cannot be converted to PDF. I worked on that cinelerra.texi file in order to get "nice looking" PDF and HTML files. I corrected texinfo errors, worked on images, added indexes, tables and a ton of other things and here are the results: http://www.europephoto.com/info/cinelerra/200610/20061031_CinelerraCV_Manual/cinelerra.pdf http://www.europephoto.com/info/cinelerra/200610/20061031_CinelerraCV_Manual/cinelerra.html We needed some clarifications about Secrets of Cinelerra manual's license. I sent an email to Heroine Virtual Ltd, asking them for information about the license applying to that manual. Here is the verbatim reply I got from HV on Mon, 30 Oct 2006: "You can copy and redistribute it all you want as long as you credit the original author. The Wiki was originally a copy of Secrets of Cinelerra." Thank you Heroine Virtual Ltd for sharing your work! We can now add some new contents into the manual. That's a corrobation anyway, since the manual is included with Cinelerra, which is itself released under the GPL (have a look at hvirtual/LICENCE). What should we start with? In my opinion, we should not reinvent the wheel, and Alex and some other contributors already worked on the documentation available on the TWiki: http://ftconsult.taxnetusa.com/twiki/bin/view/Cinelerra/CinelerraManualTOC The TWiki contains the Secrets of Cinelerra manual, which Alex copied after having asked 4 years ago Heroine Virtual Ltd for the permission. Alex and other people added more information later on. Alex agrees about the principle of copying the TWiki-specific contents into the manual. He answered on Tue Oct 31 2006 and told me there shouldn't be any licensing issue. IMO (IANAL), since the TWiki is based on Secrets of Cinelerra (which is GPL), the TWiki is itself GPLed. And therefore, further work made on it is also GPLed. The fact that we are working on the manual does not make the TWiki irrelevant at all. The TWiki is a very convenient place for everybody to share information about Cinelerra. Any interesting TWiki new contents should be copied into the manual which will ship with Cinelerra-CV. That also works in the other direction. ;-) We could now start collaborating on the manual. To do so we have to be able to share our work, that is why we need SVN accounts for people working on the documentation. At the beginning, there will be a lot of revisions on the manual, and we don't want to commit our changes everyday into the "main" SVN branch. Isn't it possible to set up a documentation-specific SVN branch? That way, we would commit our work into that branch, and commit major changes less often into the official SVN branch. When there will be less changes made to the manual, we could decide to merge the development branch into the main SVN branch. --------------------------------------------------- -- Who could help me regarding those SVN issues? -- -- Who is in charge of SVN? -- --------------------------------------------------- Some changes must be done in the shell scripts used to compile Cinelerra-CV, in order to generate the .pdf and .html manuals automatically. There are few dependencies to add (imagemagick to convert the images, texinfo to generate the manuals), and only a few commands have to be ran to generate the manuals: 1 - Ensure texinfo and imagemagick are installed on the system 2 - Convert the .png images in hvirtual/doc to .pdf files in the same directory for a in *.png; do convert $a `echo $a | sed "+s+.png+.pdf+g"`; done 3 - Generate the HTML manual in hvirtual/doc texi2html --nosec-nav cinelerra.texi 4 - Create the /usr/share/doc/cinelerra directory if it doesn't exist 5 - Delete everything in /usr/share/doc/cinelerra 6 - Copy hvirtual/doc/cinelerra.html and hvirtual/doc/*.png to /usr/share/doc/cinelerra 7 - Generate the PDF manual in hvirtual/doc texi2pdf -q --pdf cinelerra.texi 8 - Copy hvirtual/doc/cinelerra.pdf to /usr/share/doc/cinelerra I could create one shell script to do all of these tasks. But I don't think that's the way to go. I assume make should handle the process. Can someone help me with that issue? That would avoid me to RTFM about makefiles, and I could concentrate my efforts on working on the manual's contents. Since we are almost ready to collaborate on the manual, who is interested in contributing to the manual? We have to select the TWiki-specific contents to copy into the manual and work on it before putting it in the manual. The cinelerra.texi file is quite easy to understand; Texinfo tags are very simple. We also need some (good) English-speaking people to proof-read the manual. BTW, should we use American English, or Great-Britain English in the manual? What's your opinion? Nicolas. _______________________________________________ Cinelerra mailing list [email protected] https://init.linpro.no/mailman/skolelinux.no/listinfo/cinelerra
