Re: Contributions to the ImageJ User Guide

Posted by Tiago Ferreira-2 on
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/Contributions-to-the-ImageJ-User-Guide-tp3689353p3689354.html

First of all thank you all for your comments.

I will try to answer to all of you, so forgive me for not doing it individually.

I am really sorry if my call sounded dubious:
- I do not expect any monetary profit from this
- I do want this to be open, to be a community effort. Thats the only reason,
  why this was announced here in first place.

Johannes has offered to host the pdf source on a Git repository. I think that
would be the way to go.

The reason I involuntary "forked" the documentation is just casual. I had to
assemble some pages for a small group of people and the thing just grew out
of control. :)

I'm extremely found of the IJ wiki. I was thrilled when Christian announced the
new version, with the neat pdf converter.

But for understandable reasons I did not start this document there (neither any
of several others who have started similar documents). If I had predicted the
evolution of the guide, then I would have though in much detail about the
writing process...

So this is how I 'envision' the future of the ImageJ manual (please bear with my
personal opinion), even if I did not think how to implement it:
    - I'll populate the IJ wiki with my notes
      (any thoughts on how to do that programmatically?)
    - We all mature the wiki pages.
    - In parallel,  the same process happens with the LaTeX source (which I
      predict will have less participants).
    - At whatever periodicity, we feedback both, and hopefully, lets say once a
      year, a new document can be compiled and the HTML version could be sent to
      Wayne.
    - I also think an overloaded guide won't be useful to the average user, so
      if the documentation starts to grow I would append it to a second
      manual, "The Advanced User guide" or something like that.

But honestly in the immediate run I would like to just finish what I have. In my
naive perception of things, if you identify yourself with this right away and
want to contribute, you could:
    - Annotate the draft (Jarnal, Skim, Xournal, Foxit, Acrobat, etc.) and send
      me your comments.
    - Create or edit a "GUI Command" entry on the wiki, that I could then use
     <http://imagejdocu.tudor.lu/doku.php?id=gui:start>
    - Just email me your notes in whatever format you prefer.    
   
Otherwise, if you need the files I can upload them somewhere or we could start
the repository right away. Or I can create an account on ScribTeX or MonkeyTeX,
(use dropbox?) and would make it collaborative that way.

Let me know what you think,

Tiago