Post Hoary

[Matthew Thomas]

On 4 Mar, 2005, at 10:06 AM, Corey Burger wrote:
> ...
> I content that we should to the wiki as the primary source for all  
> documents.

That's good, as long as you're using it just as a source for text, not  
expecting the layout to be automatic.

Look, for example, at these documents from the vendors of other  
well-known operating systems:
*   <http://images.apple.com/macosx/pdf/Panther_Unix_TB_10082003.pdf>
*    
<http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/6/16674679-1e6e-4304-a5a0 
-49eeaa31e639/RevGuide.pdf>
*   <http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/rhel4/UpgradeGuidelines.pdf>

None of them are particularly complicated, but you couldn't get  
documents like those from an automatic wiki->PDF conversion.

> ...
> 1. We need to choose a ship format. I say either PDF[1] or HTML
>
> 2. A good converter from HTML --> PDF
>
> 3. The wiki needs some major work on the backend
> -Remove parenting
> -Standardize on one markup (I propose the Wikipedia one, as it is
> fairly easy and becoming a standard)
> ...

In MediaWiki (the Wikipedia software), at least, you can insert raw  
HTML containing style= attributes. But there are some aspects of CSS  
that style attributes can't feasibly control. And even something as  
simple as headers and footers on each page of a PDF wouldn't be  
practical unless you have HTML-to-PDF software that implements CSS3  
Paged Media. Do you?

-- 
Matthew Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/