On 01/06/2011 12:44, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote: > I'd assign most of the work to the authors, because structuring > *technical* content and translations IMO can not be done by somebody > else, regardless of according skills.
Lukasz mentioned a very valid point. If you have multiple authors, then consistency across chapters are very important to the book layout. That includes styling, screenshots, code samples etc... So somebody would have sit down and develop a "chapter style template" using OpenOffice or LaTeX or whatever the authors use. Once all chapters are written, then comes the book layout, table of content, index etc... by that time the authors of the chapters are probably not interested in that boring bit. All things that a editor can do... Yes, with eBooks there role is becoming less important, but they are still needed to some degree. > technical details of the text. The community also can contribute to the > structure of a book, because the users (readers) often have needs or > expectations *different* from the insiders view on the topics. Then maybe the community must start creating a "community driven Lazarus book". Judging by how small the FPC or Lazarus community is, compared to other Open Source projects - I doubt that will ever get off the ground though. > documentation in dedicated places. I'd be happier with HTML, where it's > easier to update and reorganize the entire "book", but this again > doesn't allow for book-style sequential reading. Dunno about eBook > features at all. I personally hate HTML "books". Rather give me a PDF, EPUB, CHM or INF book. For a community book I would suggest writing it in some text file format that allows for revision control, and then later the final output can be generated from that book source. Many such formats already exist: DocBook, LaTeX, IPF, AsciiDoc etc.. Anyway, I wish the authors well and hope their efforts with the Lazarus book has good returns. I sure hope a digital version will also become available - maybe the authors can then get a larger percentage of the profits too. Regards, - Graeme - -- fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
