Re: Abiword Documentation

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David,
Good to hear from you again after more than a decade.

Pleased to have your approval for a rewrite, although I do not think that 
a rewrite "from scratch" is the best idea. The framework is sound, and 
obviously a lot of thought went into designing it over a dozen years ago.

I think that "drop-in" replacements for work in need of update and, in 
some cases removal of some pages. Some pages will have to be written from 
scratch where the facility did not exist years ago. This will have the 
advantage of retaining the documentation during the update, even if some 
of it is not accurate.

I beg the indulgence of developers if I have to ask inane questions to 
assist me in preparing the documents such as:
When I select Execute from the tools menu the program returns "no scripts 
found". Where does it look for scripts? What languages does it understand? 
and what kind of thing can it do?


Leon Stedman
Secretary; UKIP South Suffolk Association
BREXIT will save our bacon. (and our fish, industry, jobs...)


On Sun, 7 Aug 2016, David Chart wrote:

>
>> On 2016/08/07, at 18:44, Leon Stedman <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> 1. David Chart, who is named as documenter, is not contactable on the e-mail address given.
>
> It’s 13 years old.
>
>> He does not appear to have changed any documents since 2003.
>
> That sounds about right. There might possibly be something that I changed in 2004, but probably not.
>
>>
>> Each unit of documentation consists of two files. An Abiword document and an "info" file. The info file is plain text and three lines long. These two files are compiled. using "make", a python script, and standard headers and footers (all part of the "documents" distribution), into an HTML file used by Abiword.
>
> IIRC, part of the reason for this was to ensure that Abiword’s HTML export was constantly being tested.
>
>>
>> I had intended to write some new documents, but I have found that the existing documents, excellent though they were when written in 2002/3, are so far out of date as to be useless.
>
> That sounds about right. I’m not entirely sure that 1.0 had been released when I stopped work.
>
> If you want to rewrite from scratch, do so with my blessing. I don’t have time to work on this any more, and haven’t for years. It’s good to see someone picking it up.
>
> -- 
> David Chart
> http://www.davidchart.com/
>
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