Ah yes, I see what you are getting at.
While not directly QL related, this would fall under the general banner of indirectly relevant since the distribution of documentation is always a problem to us unless it is in Quill DOC or plain text format.
With the new software and operating systems facilities we do need to look beyond QL formats or to extend what formats we can cope with. My own QL Documentation CD has material in everything from Quill DOC, plain text and RTF to HTML, PDF and Word files, without much in the way of consistency although I did try to convert between formats where it was straightforward.
All too often we find that manuals etc for QL software sneak out as PDF or Word DOC files because (with the possible exception of HTML) we don't have a common file format which supports inclusion of graphics which are needed more and more for our ever more modern and complex QL software.
There may be forthcoming standards for other systems out there which we need to be aware of, as you say who knows what people like Jonathan Hudson may decide to port next?
As long as it's kept fairly short and general so that it does not go over the heads of the average QLer I don't see any problem with such material as long as it's placed in a QL context of some form, such as "this is what's happening outside our scene, we need to consider how relevant it could be to us and see if we can port something or produce something of our own."
Within common sense limits, I don't see a problem in attacking such a subject from that kind of viewpoint.
What do others think?
No problem to myself, as I already read a wide variety of computer and technology magazines and literature.
Which is also true, I am sure, of many of the users of QL derived systems now.
As long as the article is sensible and informative, it all adds to the knowledge and usefulness in the wider sense.
I subscribe to a specialist magazine called 'Living with Technology' that was started up about 2 years ago by some 'minority' computer enthusiasts with a mainly Acorn/RISCOS background.
It now covers a wide variety of articles on up-to-date information about technology from the point of view of actually using it with understanding about what is actually going on.
Try looking it up on >
http://www.livtech.co.uk
The most recent issue had articles, amongst others, on :-
Archiving Cine to Video/DVD Energy Saving Lights( LEDs ) Google is Your Friend! Home Theatre PC
Norman Dunbar wrote:I wasn't referring to humour, at least, I hadn't thought about it as such. I was thinking more along the lines of articles of a general computing nature.
For a possible example, I sometimes work with manuals, instructions whatever in DocBook format. Once written in this (specialised) XML format, a file can then be converted into an HTML document in many 'pages' (one per section) or into a single HTML document with everything in it, or to PDF format etc. The is done using XSLT which are templates that are applied to the source file and they produce the output format of choice either directly or indirectly.
As an article, I would only give an introduction to DocBook, a few small examples and point the reader in the general direction of a few Web sites for further information. As for XSLT and so on, I don't even know where to begin with that piece of Voodoo - it's well beyond me and my abilities.
One potential (and planned) use of DocBook is to convert my QDOS Internals web site (still unfinished) into DocBook and get the benefits of generating the HTML for the Web, plus downloadable files in the three different formats. And so on.
While we don't (yet) have anything remotely like this for the QL, who knows - the very thought of it might spur someone with the talent to do the job, on to actually doing it.
-- Malcolm Cadman _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
