Date: 19 Feb 2002 18:23:00 -0800 From: swear@blarg.net (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Michael Lucas <mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org> Cc: Jay Edwards <jayed@jayed.com>, Tom Rhodes <darklogik@pittgoth.com>, bmah@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSDCon Doc BoF Notes Message-ID: <fg1yfgdh8b.yfg@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <20020218191647.A11924@blackhelicopters.org> References: <200202182315.g1INFpc93221@bmah.dyndns.org> <3C719161.5090803@pittgoth.com> <20020219050357.GN42451@jayed.com> <20020218191647.A11924@blackhelicopters.org>
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Michael Lucas <mwlucas@blackhelicopters.org> writes: > Of course, other suggestions are welcome. This bikeshed is going to > be around a while, I'm afraid. Paper book readers don't care whether book is split into small HOWTO-sized pieces because they'll need to buy big books in any case. Their only concern is how expensive each book is and how many they will need to buy. Trying to divide the current handbook by subject seems to me a useless cause for paper books. Almost everyone would need all the books. The only reasonable division is by detail and that would take much rewriting and duplication of material. Ideally, each topic could have two or three levels of presentation, which could be separated for three (or more for the most detailed (man page?) level) paper books (and made accessible via link for paged digital versions). It sounds like too much work, but except for a simple splitting of the manual into all-needed-by-all parts (maybe with the minor help of segregating networking or other big categories), it seems like the only reasonable scheme. For instance in the "Security" section, the "Kerberos" topic could have a short intro just to let people know why they might want to investigate it further and then referrence the topic as in the "Details" book. Topics would have widely varying coverage in the "Basics" book, as commonly needed by users, but probably influenced by the need to keep the Basics book under some size limit. The organization of the paged digital version (eg, HTML) hardly matters as long as appropriate tables of content and indexes are provided. I'd prefer these not even exist for only the Handbook, but also cover the Articles, FAQ, and all other FDP docs. I hope there will always be a fully-combined ASCII version of the handbook since that's the only one that's easily navigated/searched. I found this to be one of the great advantages over Linux HOWTOs. (Don't ask why I didn't make myself one.) Finally, several people have mentioned that multiple small books would be easier for people (mostly doc people) to deal with. I have little experience here, but it seems to me that Chapters and Articles are the natural chunks that people deal with at any one time, and the number of those grouped into any one book should barely matter. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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