[TYPO3] Documentation nightmare

[Daniel Bruessler]

Hello Christopher,

> advantages such as maintainers for individual sections of
> longer documents such as the TSref. I couldn't, for example, take on
> the maintenance of the entire TSref or TS by Example, but I could
> certainly commit to maintaining a cObject or two. Using BE logins and
> workspaces, we could also semi-automate the process of upgrading major
> docs.

Hey great, that's a good point. So we can do a select-query in the DB to 
show the list WHO is responsible for WHAT part of the documentation. 
That's good for people who like to help!

> Moreover, some parts of manuals--maybe TS property tables?--could be
> generated from the source itself (as, e.g. the documentation in the
> Ext Dev extension). This would be easier to implement in a web-based
> platform than in something like OpenOffice etc.

yes! It's easy to create tt_content datasets with texts.

> In addition, while word-processors are good tools for *creating*
> documents, they're terrible for reading them. They don't usually have
> particularly good navigation tools, and they're often full of
> distracting visual 'noise' such as the underlines created by
> spell-checkers etc. Web pages and pdfs are much better in general for
> electronic reading.

Yes, that's the reason I'm often using the HTML-rendered version of a 
manual on www.typo3.org . I think many do it.

My clients prefer a PDF to print it.

> Finally, I think if the community can figure out a fairly robust
> system for document creation and publication (i.e. outputting from db
> to HTML, sxw, pdf etc), it would be a *terrific* feature for promoting
> TYPO3 in certain communications-heavy sectors (i.e. for clients with
> large marketing or PR needs). (...)

PDF seems to be still a problem with FPDF - but on
http://www.fpdf.org/
I can read "Automatic page break".

We have an extension that can output OpenOffice-documents.

For the international ISO-standard OpenDocument there's also a solution.

> The biggest problem I can think of with respect to document creation
> with TYPO3 is, as I mentioned previously, pagination (i.e. given that
> there are two different paper sizes in very wide use). But as I also
> mentioned, even if this problem could *not* be solved (which I think
> is doubtful), it's common in academic circles to refer to specific
> locations in text according to numbering systems that do NOT
> correspond to physical pages--and it really creates no significant
> difficulties.

Yes, that was also my cause of concern. But in the morning I got up I 
got it: Why don't we treat "TYPO3-page" as "document"? ;-)

> Finally, some years ago, I suggested on the list that it would be a
> great idea to offer printed versions of the major manuals (TSref etc)
> for sale via one of the many online publishing services (proceeds to
> the association). If the costs were reasonable, I for one would buy a
> TSref for each new TYPO3 version (since as things stand, I have to
> print the docs myself and have them commercially bound anyway).

Yes, that would be possible. We can do it like wikipedia. Everything is 
online, but it can also be bought as book. But: this leads to a problem 
when we start to use also multimedia-content like small videos and 
interactive documentation. :-) Pablo Picasso would use also 
multimedia-content for documentation.

Cheers!
Daniel