Date: Mon Mar 28 2005 - 08:49:55 CEST
(I sent this yesterday but the attachment was unexpectedly large...)
Hi,
On 27 Mar 2005, at 07:47, Tom von Schwerdtner wrote:
> Initial run over the style.css is here:
>
> http://people.etria.com/~tvon/AbiHelp/
>
> It has a few issues and is generally incomplete, but you get the
> idea.
It looks nice (though see attachment for possible buglet).
I was playing with the docs a couple of years ago for AbiWord 2.0 and
developed a template-driven XHTML export option which added menus and
style elements. This is still visible on my site here:
http://www.crazy-wormhole.com/AlinaMeridon/AbiWord/abidocs/
The actual template is a little cumbersome, but once created is quite
handy. I have an intention to work on this a little in the near future.
> And a quick run at improving the general doc-reading experience is
> here (basically adding helper images):
>
> http://people.etria.com/~tvon/abihelp-sample/dialogfind.html
Looks great.
> ..which leads to a problem... How should I be adding images to the
> documentation? It seems you have to make an educated guess to size
> the image so it will come out right in the generated html which is
> tedious and time consuming. Is there a better way I'm missing?
Isn't this the old problem? Unless you size images by percentages
(which usually looks crap) or use, e.g., PHP then you have to assume a
browser width. I used to assume a width of about 780 pixels, but these
days I've noticed sites assuming a wider screen, so these days I might
be tempted to assume 950 pixels.
> 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?
I have certainly suggested this from time to time, but how to do it?
One way might be to have a special image property giving a relative
link to an image, and the XHTML exporter would use that link rather
than export the embedded image. The actual images would therefore be
saved separately in platform-specific directories and copied by the
build script as appropriate.
One concern I have is that there will always be some inconsistencies
between the platforms and we need a system that can cope with these
exceptions.
Ciao, Frank
