Documentation and user guide

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W0RMT
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Documentation and user guide

Post by W0RMT » Sat Dec 07, 2019 11:13 pm

Folks-

Development on this project is fast, and features and menu arrangement change rapidly. I know it's not top priority to update the user guide continuously, and it's just not realistic for the developers to do so when they are focused on coding!

And recently we've had some great contributions from the community here: diagrams of the OpenGD77 button layouts and menus from F1CXG and EA3BIL. It would be great if these things were incorporated into the user guide at some point.

I'm willing to work on updating the user guide as regularly as I can. Would others like to help? If so perhaps a few of us can define a workflow for that and try to keep the documentation updated.

It looks like Roger is using MS Word and then rendering a pdf from that, and then Andrew is converting it to markdown?

Please chime in with thoughts and if you might be interested in helping.

VK3KYY
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Re: Documentation and user guide

Post by VK3KYY » Sat Dec 07, 2019 11:49 pm

Bud

I was hoping that the Markdown version could become the master but some people want the guide as PDF and I couldn't find any easy way to export from Markdown to PDF.

There are a few websites which claim to do this but they either don't work or don't export images.

I'm happy to make the Markdown version the master, but I'm struggling to find time to maintain one version let alone 2 ;-)

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W0RMT
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Re: Documentation and user guide

Post by W0RMT » Sun Dec 08, 2019 12:00 am

Let me play around with it. R will knit markdown to pdf. I'll see if I can load that markdown file into R and render a pdf that way. I'll try later this evening.

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Re: Documentation and user guide

Post by VK3KYY » Sun Dec 08, 2019 12:03 am

W0RMT wrote:
Sun Dec 08, 2019 12:00 am
Let me play around with it. R will knit markdown to pdf. I'll see if I can load that markdown file into R and render a pdf that way. I'll try later this evening.
Thanks

The other thing which has been lost in the translation to markdown is the table of contents.

Its auto-generated in word based on the paragraph style, so would probably need to be manually added to the markdown.

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W0RMT
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Re: Documentation and user guide

Post by W0RMT » Sun Dec 08, 2019 12:06 am

OK quick test, R knits it to pdf but the images are all missing of course. I'll play more later. But it looks possible. I might also try it with some TeX editors.

VK3KYY
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Re: Documentation and user guide

Post by VK3KYY » Sun Dec 08, 2019 12:09 am

W0RMT wrote:
Sun Dec 08, 2019 12:06 am
OK quick test, R knits it to pdf but the images are all missing of course. I'll play more later. But it looks possible. I might also try it with some TeX editors.
I think someone posted something about on of the markdown editors being able to print to PDF, but I didnt get around to trying it. (And from what I recall it was beta software and I'm not sure if it was open source or would remain free.

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W0RMT
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Re: Documentation and user guide

Post by W0RMT » Sun Dec 08, 2019 1:01 am

R is open source so we're good there. And the TeX editors I use are all FOSS. I just easily auto-generated a ToC in the .md file so we're good there too.

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Re: Documentation and user guide

Post by VK3KYY » Sun Dec 08, 2019 1:04 am

W0RMT wrote:
Sun Dec 08, 2019 1:01 am
R is open source so we're good there. And the TeX editors I use are all FOSS. I just easily auto-generated a ToC in the .md file so we're good there too.
OK

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DU2XXR
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Re: Documentation and user guide

Post by DU2XXR » Sun Dec 08, 2019 1:17 am

I'd be glad to collaborate in improving the user documentation -- at least in the content/writing part (it's part of what I do for work).

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Re: Documentation and user guide

Post by VK3KYY » Sun Dec 08, 2019 1:34 am

4I1RAC wrote:
Sun Dec 08, 2019 1:17 am
I'd be glad to collaborate in improving the user documentation -- at least in the content/writing part (it's part of what I do for work).
That would be great... Thanks

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