[Live-demo] Re: [Marketing] Marketing artefacts, subversion directories, and source formats

Nice pointer Hamish. I started to look into this a while back when I actually installed wiki → latex on our wiki, but I never got back to the PDF stuff. I wonder how easy it is to get installed.

I don’t see why we can’t just keep a text file and images in SVN or even in the wiki. The barrier to entry is essentially nil. The layout then would be up to us and our templates. Then let something else do the layout with a little help from those who know the tools. I’d volunteer to help run a bunch of the files through a template to produce both the HTML and PDF. Both of which could be done in a single run of latex. But if it means opening up a word doc one by one by one by … twenty+ … I doubt we’ll get any volunteers.

That’s just me and I’m prone to take on more than I can handle. I’d say to add to the artifacts idea, give them a max number of words for each paragraph, a set number of short bullet points, ask for an image size (as you’ve done). We could then give them a template to try it out in - even a word doc. Once it works, then just save the text files into svn and we can take it from there.

I could be wrong, but getting simple text files will be hard enough :wink:

Tyler
Tyler

----- Original Message -----
From: Hamish hamish_b@yahoo.com
Date: Saturday, May 15, 2010 6:46 pm
Subject: Re: [Live-demo] Re: [Marketing] Marketing artefacts, subversion directories, and source formats
To: tech@wildintellect.com, Cameron Shorter cameron.shorter@gmail.com
Cc: OSGeo Marketing marketing@lists.osgeo.org, “live-demo@lists.osgeo.orglive-demo@lists.osgeo.org

Cameron:

(Of note: Wikis do well under the above criteria, but
wiki->pdf doesn’t do well)

Hamish:

now it does! see post with links of a few days ago or go to
wikipedia.org and try the brand new “export as pdf” in the
left side frame on any article.

example-

input:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_anemone

output:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Book&bookcmd=render_article&arttitle=Sea+anemone&oldid=362311867&writer=rl


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This is certainly getting closer, but I'll add a couple more issues which would be highly desirable.

1. Fixed layout:
* I believe each Project Overview should be limited to 1 page, including an image. Working in word, a writer can easily see whether they are over the page max or not. With a wiki, you need to go through the PDF creation to verify page size (which while un-desirable, is an acceptable work around).

2. Cut-and-Paste
There are going to be lots of cases where people will want to cut-and-paste from overview documents into other marketing material. Eg: copying all relevant overviews into a Technology Comparison paper, or copying Project Overviews of all projects which support a particular OGC standard, for an OGC Standard Overview.

The doc that you copy into will probably have its own formatting requirements.

Cut and paste from a Word doc to Word/Open Office doc is relatively easy. Copy from PDF to anything else is painful, because all the header/footer information and hard CRs are copied too, and all formatting needs to be reapplied.
Copying from HTML may be easier. But again I don't think formatting copies across well.

Tyler Mitchell wrote:

Nice pointer Hamish. I started to look into this a while back when I actually installed wiki -> latex on our wiki, but I never got back to the PDF stuff. I wonder how easy it is to get installed.

I don't see why we can't just keep a text file and images in SVN or even in the wiki. The barrier to entry is essentially nil. The layout then would be up to us and our templates. Then let something else do the layout with a little help from those who know the tools. I'd volunteer to help run a bunch of the files through a template to produce both the HTML and PDF. Both of which could be done in a single run of latex. But if it means opening up a word doc one by one by one by .. twenty+ .. I doubt we'll get any volunteers.

That's just me and I'm prone to take on more than I can handle. I'd say to add to the artifacts idea, give them a max number of words for each paragraph, a set number of short bullet points, ask for an image size (as you've done). We could then give them a template to try it out in - even a word doc. Once it works, then just save the text files into svn and we can take it from there.

I could be wrong, but getting simple text files will be hard enough :wink:

Tyler
Tyler

----- Original Message -----
From: Hamish <hamish_b@yahoo.com>
Date: Saturday, May 15, 2010 6:46 pm
Subject: Re: [Live-demo] Re: [Marketing] Marketing artefacts, subversion directories, and source formats
To: tech@wildintellect.com, Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter@gmail.com>
Cc: OSGeo Marketing <marketing@lists.osgeo.org>, "live-demo@lists.osgeo.org" <live-demo@lists.osgeo.org>

> Cameron:
> > > (Of note: Wikis do well under the above criteria, but
> > > wiki->pdf doesn't do well)
>
> Hamish:
> > now it does! see post with links of a few days ago or go to
> > wikipedia.org and try the brand new "export as pdf" in the
> > left side frame on any article.
>
> example-
>
> input:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_anemone
>
> output:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Book&bookcmd=render_article&arttitle=Sea+anemone&oldid=362311867&writer=rl
>
> > _______________________________________________
> Live-demo mailing list
> Live-demo@lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/live-demo
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc
>

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Cameron Shorter
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