[FM Discuss] and the year begins

[adam hyde]

howdy :)

I hope everyone had a cheery new years and christmas!

Thought I should do a quick update before we kick off a new year. There
has been a lot happening but it may have seemed quiet due to low list
traffic in the last 6-8 weeks. I encourage anyone doing FM related work
to put as much correspondence thru the list! :) 

Heres some FM highlights from the last 8 weeks or so:
1. Aco has been busy on plugin development which is pretty wonderful. I
believe Aco will send information about the dev but essentially we have
some localisation and translation plugins. These worked out to offer
some great functionality we hadn't banked on and offer some very
interesting possibilities but I will leave Aco to elaborate. You can
sneak a peak at one of the plugins thru the docs I wrote for it in the
FM manual (http://en.flossmanuals.net/FLOSSManuals) under
'localisation'.

2. Anne Gentle from OLPC has started working on the OLPC Simple guide
using FM. Its looking pretty good and I hope this development will
continue. We have discussed some other migration possibilities of OLPC
manuals -> FM, but one step at a time!

3. PureData Booksprint - Derek Holzer, Luka Princic and I will meet in
Croatia this march if all goes well and trial a book sprint. This is an
intensive working week where we live, cook, 'n work together for an
intensive period focusing on one particular manual. I am hoping we will
get not just a PureData manual, but a working methodology for book
sprints which we could try and apply to other material.

4. Zita Joyce has been searching for Farsi translators and found some in
NZ. We are awaiting the go ahead for the Farsi site, so hopefully more
on this soon.

5. Simon Yuill and I are working on a Scribus manual. 

6. Luka Frelih has done some wonderful scripting for FM. Luka and I
spent some time together in Ljubljana a few weeks ago and he offered to
help get the DTP processes stream-lined using Scribus. The
print-on-demand process has previously been reliant on
a ..err...non-free app (blush) and I had been feeling pretty lousy about
it. So now Luka has developed a wonderful import script using the
internal python scripting engine in Scribus. You can see the first
experiment with this here:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/publish/PDF/Blender_Scribus_draft1_2.pdf

The above is a link to the Blender manual prepared using the python
import script for print-on-demand. If you look at it in a PDF viewer it
will seem like there a lot of 'empty' pages, but remember - the layout
is for print. Never-the-less I think it makes a good PDF.

I am very interested in feedback about the layout and look and feel
(designed by Lotte). I'm also interested in the way the credits are
dealt with in the front of the pdf/book (Julian - any comments?)

I think we can get the print-ready process down to a day for any manual.

7. After chasing a board member down I finally have his bio and
re-confirmation of involvement. Phew. So I am kick starting the board
intros this week (long overdue).

8. Mick Fuzz wrote a marathon amount of material for video distribution.
In particular we have a very nice Azureus (bittorrent client) manual and
an excellent Avidemux (transcoder, editor, subtitle manager) manual
(also on print on demand - http://www.lulu.com/content/1815079), and
after a bit of editing we will have an excellent manual on archive.org,
miro, and podcasting.

9. Mick is also organising an event to coincide with the Video Vortex
(http://www.networkcultures.org/videovortex/) event in Amsterdam. Micks
event is called vxmission (http://transmission.cc/vxmission) and will be
held partly in the FM studios and in a squat nearby. FM will present FM
and Mick will present some of the manuals he has written.

10. There is some discussion of other manuals for the book sprint model,
but too early to mention really. When they get closer to being confirmed
I will write more about them.


Those are the highlights, there is more but I'll post more as things
become more confirmed. So you thought all was quiet! Indeed not. 

Anyways, I'm in Amsterdam at the moment, and off to NZ for a few weeks
after a TWiki meeting in Amsterdam on the 25th of this month. There is a
floss camp in NZ there which happens to be next to my favourite camping
ground. Goodo! 

Still, that's some time away so plenty to do before then.

:)

adam





-- 
Adam Hyde
FLOSS Manuals

http://www.flossmanuals.net