[TYPO3-dev] Finding Updates in Manuals

[Michael Stucki]

Hi Stefan,

> maybe some of you have the same problem with updated manuals:
> I get a new manual for an updated plugin (or eg. a new TSref) and want
> to know, where I find the changes since the last version I know ...

I can only help you regarding the core documents: Since version 4.0, I used
to make diffs for all documents on every release. This is done manually
using "o3read" which creates text dumps from OpenOffice.org documents.

Those diffs are available on SourceForge (browse the "CoreDocs" SVN
repository).

Additionally there is also a copy of every document for each TYPO3 version.

> So a question to the OpenOffice-Gurus:
> Is there a OpenOffice-Feature, that helps with this issue ?
> In OpenOffice, I find
>    - "Änderungen aufzeichnen" (= Record changes ?)
>    - "Versionsverwaltung" (= Versioning ?)
> Could this be an option to let users see the changes from version to
> version in a doc/manual.sxw ?
> Or is this impossible in SXW-Format ?

Last time I checked, this failed completely when looking for changes inside
a table of a text document (as it occurs in TSref, for example).

> If there is no solution with OpenOffice, is/could be there an offical
> recommended way to mark/list changes in manuals ?

If the text diff is good enough, we might add a SVN hook for creating them
automatically. What do you think?

> Maybe a column at the side of each page with Versionnumbers 'Implemented
> in Version x.y'?

I never liked this idea because it blows up the layout of TSref extremely.
If you code a project in TYPO3 4.0, just downloads the TSref 4.0.

> Especially for big manuals like TSref, CoreApi etc. it would be a
> _great_ feature to find (or better highlight) the changes form e.g. 4.1.
> to 4.2. ;)

Have a look here:
http://typo3.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/typo3/CoreDocs/trunk/

- michael
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