FLOSS Manuals Tools

Facilitated by Adam Hyde, FLOSSManuals.net

FLOSSManuals.net offers a wiki-like platform for authoring documentation for open source software. This session will provide an introduction to the documentation toolset available from FLOSS Manuals, including index building, editing tools, translation tools, live manual API, print on demand tools, copyright management, and remixing content into different manual configurations.

We will look at the state of free documentation, the FLOSS Manuals workflow and toolset.

FLOSS Manuals is a non-profit foundation based in Amsterdam. The foundation creates free, open source documentation for free, open source software. FLOSS Manuals is also a community of free documentation writers that publish free manuals about free software across multiple languages.

adam@flossmanuals.net

Notes

unformatted and typos

About FLOSS Manuals

• Contact FLOSS to create project
• Structured wiki
• Collaborative
• Dynamic
• Fill void of good documentation
• T-Wiki based
• Heirarchal Format
• HTML is free
• Downloade PDF
• Maintainers for Project
• Cached/Pushed version of Documentation
• licensed under GPL
• Revision history
• Chapters are Modular (ability to remix)
• Content under one framework
• Print Ready PDF with CSS
• Integrated with LUDA.com for print services
• Book store is a embeddable widget
• Books are a great marketing tool
• Workflow
  • Wiki-like
  • Match development process
• Page Limit (at the moment there is a manual that has 250)
• Translation
  • Language Groups
  • Split screen Translation Workflow
• Franchise of FLOSS Manuals (with Language Groups)
  • Branding is retained
• Different elvels of documentation
  • Tech Writers
    • Spellcheckers
    • Image Cropping
• Money from Books
  • Deciciions on how to spend are between maintainers and FLOSS Manuals
• Main Projects
  • Linux Documentation Project
  • Ubuntu Documentation Project

TWiki

• T-Wiki forked
  • Could be an issue

Documentation Issues

• Documenting is not held in esteem
• Not put into project plan
• Can users be trusted to create documentation
• Value of documentation for developers
• Different audiences mean different manual/documentation
• Documentation Recognition
• There is not a free documentation sector
• Need for publication, physicial books