Re: FDSCo agenda 11-Mar-2007 Item 6 PDF Versions

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sun, 2007-03-11 at 11:35 +0300, John Babich wrote:
>  FDP Team:
>  
>  I propose a short discussion of the possibility of including
>  PDF versions for certain key documents on the wiki.
>  
>  These would need to be manually created until all the
>  pieces are in place for an automatic creation process.
>  
>  Any referenced links should be made explicit, which would
>  require modifying some wiki pages. Single-page views
>  should be created to make it easier to manually produce
>  the desired PDFs. 
Great discussion topic!  My US $0.02:

* I think you're getting yourself into a world of pain when you start
talking about non-automated generation of wiki => PDF.  The wiki lends
itself well to "update early and often."  Manual generation, by
definition, does not.

* To which key documents do you refer?

* What use case is driving generation of PDF for these documents?  A PDF
may be useful for printing things "prettily," but a document that lives
(in the sense of "lives and breathes") on the wiki and is being updated
regularly shouldn't be relied on in frozen, dead-tree form, where it
can't receive updates.  And if the document *doesn't* change often, we
should be converting it to XML and maintaining it in CVS/${SCM}.  I can
easily envision, and even see simple mental pseudocode for, a script
that watched RSS for changes, and regenerated and posted new PDF as
needed.  But that seems like a huge kludge crying out for CMS:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/Plone

My preference is (almost always) to expand our ability to perform these
tasks in a more scalable way.  I realize that often those goals require
a much larger technical skill set, and I certainly don't profess to
possess it, but sometimes what's needed is not so much "the doing" as
the wrangling and coordination of other people who can do.

However, as far as the wiki goes, I certainly am not going to stand in
the way of people editing, since that is in fact the point!  I notice
that all the sentences above are passive voice ("<X> should be done");
did you mean to say you were volunteering to do this?  If so, nothing
prevents you from "just doing it," Nike-style. :-)  

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
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