FYI: Gordon and I have committed to changing over to open document format for the base document, and will be uploading the individual sections to GitHub as the conversion proceeds. It will then be very easy to produce PDF and HTML from reassembling those when a release is ready.
This conversion will take quite a bit of time, judging from the result of exporting the Lyx file to odf:
images are all different sizes, all over the page at times
left margin varies back and forth by a few
tables and headers lack the nice formatting
new templates will need to be created
etc.
People interested in watching and/or participating in the process can click the GIT tab at the top of the Forum, then scroll down and click on the mxum entry.
(I will need to check on how exactly to work on the GitHub side...)
Production: 5.10, MX-23 Xfce, AMD FX-4130 Quad-Core, GeForce GT 630/PCIe/SSE2, 16 GB, SSD 120 GB, Data 1TB Personal: Lenovo X1 Carbon with MX-23 Fluxbox and Windows 10 Other: Raspberry Pi 5 with MX-23 Xfce Raspberry Pi Respin
Jerry3904 wrote:FYI: Gordon and I have committed to changing over to open document format for the base document, and will be uploading the individual sections to GitHub as the conversion proceeds. It will then be very easy to produce PDF and HTML from reassembling those when a release is ready.
This conversion will take quite a bit of time, judging from the result of exporting the Lyx file to odf:
images are all different sizes, all over the page at times
left margin varies back and forth by a few
tables and headers lack the nice formatting
new templates will need to be created
etc.
People interested in watching and/or participating in the process can click the GIT tab at the top of the Forum, then scroll down and click on the mxum entry.
(I will need to check on how exactly to work on the GitHub side...)
Curious... Does this mean the original document will no longer begin in lyx? If so what tool will you use to construct the base document with?...sorry, I'm not familiar with this process.
If I can assist in any way, I would be happy to do so. I've only been using MX for a few weeks, having converted from Linux Mint, but would like to contribute.
I don't use Lyx, though I imagine I could learn enough for this purpose. However, if you are exporting the documents so that it is the clean-up and proofing that needs doing, that should be irrelevant. I've been using Libre Office (and before that, I tried Open Office) and generally stick to Open Document Format for my files (exporting to PDF or doing a Save As to .doc if sending to other people).
Feel free to contact me by email — I can fill you in on my background and you can tell me how I can contribute best.
To start, some history. Jerry wrote the first version of the Manual (for MX-14) in the html format which suited screens of any size. Then came user requests for the Manual as a pdf too. Lyx provided the answer. Both html and pdf converters are built into the Lyx package with correctly formatted versions produced with a couple of clicks. The disadvantage with Lyx is that while it is popular with academics and often used to to write a thesis, it is not commonly used by others, such as the MX Community. In contrast Libre Office is used by many, and is the default word processor in MX.
As Jerry has commented, the change from Lyx to LO will take some time and effort. A reasonable conversion can be done by pasting an html copy of the manual into
a empty LO file. The Table of Contents has to be remade so that internal links are correct, most images have to be rescaled, and many pages need adjustments to prevent broken sentences and lost headings at the page breaks. However,once all this is completed, updates should be easier.
There are a couple of small glitches in conversion from LO to html. In Tables and some images, the framing lines can get lost. Also, unless deleted in the LO settings,
image file names can appear next to the captions. LO to pdf conversions look to be okay - I'm still checking this.
Finally, GitHub is a completely mystery to me. Will have to do some serious reading.
LO to pdf conversions look to be okay - I'm still checking this.
That option was one of the attractions of Linux to me, before the turn of the century, say around 1997!
Sometimes, I'd create tables separately, and drop them in the main document when satisfied, from memory. Possibly even edited HTML image tags for mouse over descriptions. I did move away from producing web pages from word processors fairly quickly, but the main gist seemed to be sticking with certain conventions for headings etc. so as not to confuse LO. Word was a dog's breakfast if you edited much, with numerous redundant html code sections left inactive in the final result.
for me
