Re: [Gimp-docs] Help building help.

[Roman Joost <romanofski gimp org>]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2013 at 10:00:12AM +0200, Marco Ciampa wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 10:17:50PM +0200, Ulf-D. Ehlert wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 02:41:02PM -0400, john Culleton wrote:
> > > Elaborate things break more often then simple things. All I want is a
> > > Gimp Manual in pdf form for version 2.8. I can print this out, put it
> > > in a ring binder and use it as needed.
> >
> > Making pdf always was problematic for some languages, the html manual
> > is IMO a better choice. BTW, do you really want to print some hundred
> > pages?
>
> PDF pages are no longer just for print but a mean to read with computer
> / tablet / ebook reader. I myself use a kindle to read GIMP books in PDF
> in the spare time.
>
> I would not underestimate the importance of the pdf format for a manual.
Perhaps it would make better sense, to remove the PDF functionality
(based on dblatex), since it never left a stable stage.

The reason to choose dblatex was that FOP at the time was not mature 
enough to produce good quality output. I think that has changed. DbLatex 
worked well for latin content, but always seemed to give us headaches
with totally different character sets. Perhaps it's not dblatex fault, 
just the lack investigating a good LaTeX -> PDF solution.

Anyhow, perhaps it makes more sense to move to a epub/Kindle solution. I 
can relate to Marco here, since I'm also using my Kindle to read most of 
my books now. The Kindle format is even simiar to HTML. Not sure if
there are already packages out there who go from DocBook to Kindle/epub.

Cheers
-- 
Roman Joost
www: http://www.romanofski.de
email: romanofski gimp org