Re: Improving the documentation aesthetics

<snip>

>
>> Someone on IRC (I forget who, sorry) sugested that it would be nice
>> if we could have images for each OS stored in the package and
>> selected/inserted into the docs when they are generated. I have no
>> clue how this would be accomplished without manually editing the .abw
>> files. Anyone have an idea?
>>
>>
> To be honest, I took a brief look at the Docs build stuff, and it
> doesn't look like it would be terribly difficult. It appears that the
> Abi HTML output dumps embedded images into a "index.html_files" or
> similar folder, numbered sequentially. If alternate folders could be
> created and committed to CVS outside of AbiWord, that, if present, the
> script would copy in over the "default" embedded ones, this could be
> implemented incrementally. It looks like the Perl script in the
> abiword-docs module does most of the heavy lifting, however, I know
> neither Perl nor shell scripting well enough to do this on my own.
> However, it does appear that it would not be too hard, possibly the
> hardest part knowing the target platform (just all the standard
> creation of html, check for alternate platform folder, copy in
> alternate platform images).
>
> I do know that patches are accepted, and if I get a chance, I will
> learn enough Perl to get this done, possibly by 2.4. Filing a bug
> probably wouldn't hurt, as an RFE, as I know I'd like to see this, too.
>
UPDATE! This is easiest done in the shell script, and I'm proud to
announce that I have this working in a preliminary form. There are just
a few questions I have to finalize this before I email in the patch:

- On Windows, images exported from ABW->HTML are put in <htmlfile>_files
(index.html_files, etc). Is this the same for all platforms? If not,
can it be standardized some how?

- Where in the sentient Abi build scripts are the documentation files
built? As you might suspect, the new "make_html.sh" does need to know
its platform, passed in as a variable (currently $ABI_DOC_PLAT, and
defined in the file as WIN32 :D)

- Is it desirable to ship just the one platform's images, or should I
leave (not remove before packaging) the complete set of alternate image
folders when building a particular documentation set?

Thanks so much! I hope to have this set and the first screen shots
taken this week, possibly even.

-- 
Ryan Pavlik
--
"Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses."  --Confucius