[TYPO3-dev] Extension manual rendering went completely wrong - any idea how to fix it?

[Jigal van Hemert]

Francois Suter wrote:
>> after the last release of the crawler extension the rendering process
>> for the online manual didn't really produce what we expected.
>>
>> http://typo3.org/documentation/document-library/extension-manuals/crawler/3.0.5/view/ 
> 
> This looks like the outline level of your paragraphs all went awry. This 
> happens sometimes and seems due to an OpenOffice bug (it happened to me 

As sensitive as "we" are about the product name TYPO3, this product is 
of course named OpenOffice.org ;-)

I don't think everything can be blamed on a bug. I downloaded the .sxw 
file and noticed that the page headers contain very strange texts. It 
seems that the second level of the settings in the chapter numbering is 
set to the profile 'text block' instead of a heading level.

> once with the TSref :-/ ). This was discussed recently in this very 
> list. Look for the thread entitled "Easy way to test extensions manual".

It seems to me that we try to misuse OpenOffice.org writer a bit here. 
If the document looks fine inside OpenOffice.org, if it looks fine in a 
converted PDF and if it print okay then the goals of this word processor 
are met. If you try to depend on the internal structure for rendering 
other types of documents you should expect some problems in certain cases.

What I've seen until now is that the conversion to online documentation 
is very sensitive to the precise construction of the .sxw document. 
Extra paragraphs, incorrect chapter numbering, etc. are all things that 
the conversion routine seemingly can't handle.
Maybe the instructions should emphasize that the conversion is very 
sensitive to construction errors?


-- 
Jigal van Hemert.