Lowering the participation barrier for Fedora Docs

[Pete Travis]

On 11/18/2013 04:53 PM, Eric H. Christensen wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 01:39:34PM -0800, Leslie S Satenstein wrote:
> > I would consider LibreOffice. We could have a master document and
> pre-assign the chapters. With markup and ability to work offline while
> commuting, it or a similar product would be beneficial for smaller
> docs or even for collaboration.
>
> With the exception of your suggestion of LibreOffice the rest is
> exactly what we do right now.  I see the biggest problem is creating
> source.  Most(?) contributors would either use vi(m) or emacs (or
> similar) to create the source.  There are other options as well,
> however.  gedit would be one of those programs that would work quite
> well as a GUI text editor.  LibreOffice Writer seems a bit heavy for
> writing source, though.
>
> I just did a quick check and it appears that LibreOffice Writer *can*
> save in the DocBookXML format although it's rendering is lacking.  I'm
> not sure it can truly support DocBookXML.  Pasting source into Writer
> and then saved as DocBookXML came out badly.  Working with something
> that isn't trying to do so much for you is better for writing code.
>
> -- Eric
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Eric "Sparks" Christensen
> Fedora Project
>
> sparks at fedoraproject.org - sparks at redhat.com
> 097C 82C3 52DF C64A 50C2  E3A3 8076 ABDE 024B B3D1
> --------------------------------------------------

Of course, that doesn't mean that we can't accept content that isn't
marked up in a given file format.  If someone wants to take the time to
write an article, but they're only willing to email it to the list in
.odf, fine. I might be willing to convert it to docbook and fit it into
a guide for a new contributor, while they learn the ropes - within
reason.  Converting things repeatedly back and forth between any two
formats is going to degrade the work, and eat up a lot of time.  This
would be something for a mentor and protege to work out between them, at
the mentor's discretion.


-- 
-- Pete Travis
 - Fedora Docs Project Leader
 - 'randomuser' on freenode
 - immanetize at fedoraproject.org


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