Greetings. Some way up this thread, I said:
On 2014 Aug 14, at 11:21, Norman Gray <nor...@astro.gla.ac.uk> wrote: > On 2014 Aug 14, at 01:10, Worik Stanton <worik.stan...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Suggestion: Package the release notes, FAQ and some other documentation >> into a PDF and sell that at the same price as the CD, from the same >> place. I'd buy that. It would be better quality than the (often) crap >> O'Reilly sell, and I buy that. > > This is potentially quite a good idea. > > The T-shirts and CDs exist because (a) some people find them useful in > themselves, and (b) some people prefer or find it more convenient to buy a > physical thing they don't intend to use, as a means of making an indirect > donation to the project. This of course is discussed at length in the rest > of this thread. > > There's precedent for such a physical book being sellable. The Python > Reference Manual [1] is a dead-tree version of the language and library > description also available for free at [2]. There's clearly some story about > the various reasons why people buy that, but it's clear that at least some > do. I have considered doing so myself -- a paper document is superior to an > on-screen one in some circumstances -- but in the end found it more > convenient to print out selected sections of the downloaded PDF. > > Places like lulu.com will put a PDF on paper for you and sell/ship the > result. I've no idea of the economic details of that, or alternatives to > lulu, but such services do exist. > > I'm not making any promises here, but given mild encouragement I'd be very > willing to take a look at how complicated it would be to turn the existing > text or texts into a readable PDF (I've done this sort of thing before, and > could probably do it fairly efficiently). After posting that, I received some ... non-discouragement off-list, and that's enough for me. At <http://nxg.me.uk/temp/openbsd-faq-suggestion/> you will find, for your delectation and delight: * A PDF of sections 1--5 of the FAQ; * An HTML version of this; * A tarball containing the source of the scripts which generate these from XML originals. The idea of the PDF is that it's something which could potentially be sold on dead trees (which might be useful/attractive for the reasons above). To do this, I took the HTML versions of the FAQ sections, and normalised them into regular XHTML (which makes them processable into other forms). With that done, it was straightforward to transform the result into both HTML for presentation, and into LaTeX for further transformation into PDF. This depends on the xsltproc package, and obviously on LaTeX. The HTML target does things like adding in consistent structuring, generating tables of contents, ensuring that internal cross-references are consistent, and so on. The results should be identical in content, and pretty similar in appearance, to the online versions. The normalisation of the contents consisted in large part of regularising away various bits of cruft used for layout (for example <blockquote> and <table> elements (eek!) around <pre>, which are fiddly to manage and are inevitably inconsistent across the document), making "..." and '...' consistent, and a couple of other things discussed in the README in the tarball. The README also contains some notes on the lightweight structuring added to the source files. It would be pretty straightforward to generate a .txt FAQ from these same sources (via *roff). The results here aren't very pretty -- and obviously I've only done the first five sections -- but they're respectable and should show the idea. Even if the PDF idea isn't taken up, this is potentially an alternative way to generate the HTML files, in contrast to hand-editing disconnected .html files. I like the idea of the 'Good Idea Fairy'! This one comes with product. Best wishes, Norman -- Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
