Re: [pdf-devel] Volunteer for documentation writing

[Russ Jones]

My experience in writing user manuals has only been for software written 
by me, and probably 1/100th of the complexity and scope of the pdf 
project. I do have experience (long ago) using TeX and LaTeX, and have 
at least skimmed the Texinfo book, which I have. So I will certainly 
need help. Is there any sort of draft already started? Or, barring that, 
is there an example the team considers particularly good that I could 
look to for guidance? Would I be working on it alone or with other authors?

I an an engineer by training, but not a software engineer. I have 
written C programs but for the most part only for my own use. So if I am 
required to read and understand the code in fine detail, that may be a 
problem.

As far as the license and copyright, that's no problem. I am a member of 
FSF and want to contribute to the free software community in some useful 
way.

Russ Jones <address@hidden>


address@hidden wrote:
>    I am interested in helping with documentation for this important
>    project.  I have quite a bit of technical writing experience
>    including writing software documentation, but am a complete newbie
>    to participation in a Free Software project.  I tried to peruse the
>    mailing list archive tonight with no success - perhaps the server
>    is down right now.  Please let me know how I can engage
>    constructively, and I will try to do so without being more trouble
>    than I'm worth.
>
> Are you experienced in writing user manuals?  I think that it would be
> interesting to start writing the user manual for the library, for at
> least two reasons:
>
> 1. The Reference Manual (doc/gnupdf.texi) is not a good document to
>    learn how to use the library.  It is getting quite big, and it will
>    be huge when completed.  The refman is also strictly following the
>    layered structure of the library, without looking into pedagogic
>    considerations.
>
> 2. The writing of the manual will surely identify a lot of non evident
>    use cases, that would be invaluable to identify flaws in the public
>    APIs described by the refman.
>
> As general requirements, the manual would have to be written in
> Texinfo, licensed with GFDL, and its copyright transferred to the Free
> Software Foundation.
>
> --
> Jose E. Marchesi  <address@hidden>
>                   http://www.jemarch.net
> GNU Project       http://www.gnu.org
>
>
>