Re: [Tads3] Eric Eve's Getting Started guide

["Eric Eve" <eric.eve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doadeer3 wrote:

> I personally second this, I can't stand PDF either. I prefer HTML.
> PDF on my computer prints out well, but it's bloated so viewing it
> electronically is slow and it does not paginate well, and all kinds
> of other things. Mainly the slowness drives me crazy. It does not make
> a good electronic reference. And the Inform manual I LOVED was the one
> (DM3, IIRC) that someone converted to a Windows Help File. I used it
> all the time, because someone went to a lot of trouble working on the
> hyperlinks -- cross referencing everything. This could be done in HTML,
> but with a lot of work.

Well, it's beginning to sound like there might be some demand for at HTML
version (pro tem you can always try the 'quick and dirty' ones I've put up)
as well as the PDF one. Incidentally your point about cross-referencing an
HTML version is the sort of thing I had in mind when talking about different
forms. But bear in mind that the Guide wasn't principally designed a
reference material, but as a tutorial for people to work through in
sequence.

> OTOH, Eric, sorry I haven't had time to look at your getting started guide
> much yet. Maybe I can give you some feedback in a month or so. I think
it's
> great you did it, are doing it, and I am sure it will probably need some
> revision as T3 evolves, so maybe some feedback later will still help.

No problem; I'm sure feedback in a month or so will still be very useful, as
I very much doubt I'll be producing a revised version before then.

Adam Thornton wrote:

> My two cents:

> Word format is horrible and nonportable.

Maybe, but that isn't really the issue, since no one is suggesting that the
Guide should be *issued* in Word. I used Word (a) because it's what I'm most
familiar with and (b) because I was planning to issue it as a PDF and knew
that the conversion from Word to PDF was a doddle. The complication is the
apparent requirement for an HTML version.

> HTML is a terrible final format.

Well, it depends what you want it for. It's not going to the only format
available in any case.

> I kind of like PDF.

So do I, but it appears that not everyone agrees with us!

> The best answer is probably something that smells like XML that is
> therefore easy to convert into other formats.  What's wrong with the
> OpenOffice/StarOffice file format?  It's free, the interface feels a lot
> like Word, it's documented, and you have a "Save As" feature to actually
> create a Word file if you want to for someone who needs it.

I'm not sure how that helps, since if the aim is to produce output in PDF I
can do that more easily from Word than from StarOffice, and if the aim is
also to produce an HTML version I'm not sure StarOffice does a much better
job than Word (I just tried) - it splits the files up more intelligently and
does some automatic hyperlinking, which is nice, but it seemed to get a bit
confused about what the chapters actually were and still doesn't cope with
theh code fragments very well.

I still suspect that it's not so much as finding the best way of
automatically outputting an HTML file from program X, as recognizing that to
do the job properly a certain amount of manual conversion will need to be
done. For example, I've got quite a reasonable output just now from saving
the Guide in RTF format and then importing it to an HTML editor. I've added
one hyperlink and tweaked the format of one or two code fragments, and
there's obviously quite a bit more tweaking that would need to be done, but
you can see the basic conversion here:

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~manc0049/TADSGuide/TadsGuide.html

-- Eric