[FM Discuss] update

[adam hyde]

hi all,

Just a brief update on some FM activities.

* Finnish FLOSS Manuals
Over the last 3 days Mick Fuzz and myself held a FLOSS Manuals workshop
in Helsinki. The workshop was organised by Minna Tarrka from M-Cult
(http://m-cult.org). The workshops were wonderful, mainly based on audio
and video production using free software. After the workshops we had
several conversations about the possibility of establishing a Finnish
FLOSS Manuals. The conversation was very positive and Minna has already
started with some steps to make this happen. The next date we are
looking at is sometime in August for Mick and I to return to Helsinki to
plan the next stages with Minna and other interested parties.

* Bengali FLOSS Manuals
Anwarul Mamun is working on the Bengali version of FLOSS Manuals.
Anwarul has started the interface translation and we are now working
together to find some initial funds to translate the initial manuals to
Bengali and carry the project through its first establishing phases.

* Farsi FLOSS Manuals
Almost there! The interface is translated (http://fa.flossmanuals.net).
We have 15 Manuals translated and more to come. The Farsi version of FM
is managed by Ali Kolahi Ahari and Ali will be supported by myself and
Zita Joyce to help in the initial phases of promoting the Farsi version
and building a community around it. At this stage we have some steps to
go through before we launch the Farsi FLOSS Manuals (mainly proofing),
but its not too far away. 

* French FLOSS Manuals
I had some very interesting initial discussions about this. With luck
and good management there will be more news on this soon :)

* PDF Exporting
Luka Felih has been doing some amazing work with the PISA and Reportlab
libraries for FLOSS Manuals. His work will enable the export of
beautiful PDF from the FLOSS Manuals repository. Luka has had his
patches to PISA accepted by the developers which is excellent as it
means others can benefit from his work on this and we don't have to
maintain the extensions to the code. The code means that PDF look and
feel will be controlled by CSS3 style definitions which opens the door
to flexible manipulation of the look and feel of the final output. Next
Aco will build this into FM and Lotte Meijer will design some more PDF
templates for the downloadable manuals and for the print on demand
source. Brett Haydon is also working on supporting Right-to-left text
with the PDF generation which will be very useful for the Farsi FLOSS
Manuals as there are very few options for RTL PDF generation at present.
More on the PDF generation process within the next weeks.

* Inkscape BookSprint
Thunderbirds are go for the Inkscape Book Sprint supported by Google. FM
is bringing the 'official' Inkscape documentation team together to Paris
in July to work on the Inkscape manual using FLOSS Manuals. This will
happen over 1 week and will be held at De Cite de Sciences in Paris.
Brianna Laugher, the 'go to' person for Wikimedia Commons, will also
attend and we will work some chapters on using Inkscape for manipulating
Wikimedia Commons SVG into the manual.

* FM/Wikimedia Commons/Inkscape workshop @ Wikimania
Brianna and I will hold a workshop at the forthcoming Wikimania in Egypt
in July on how to use Inkscape for working with Wikimedia Commons SVG.
We will use the new manual as a basis for this workshop.


There is other news but these are the main points for now - many things
in discussion but best to wait until they are a little more concrete.
I'll be traveling quite a bit in the next weeks so apologies in advance
if my response time has a small lag in it. 

:)

adam





-- 
Adam Hyde
FLOSS Manuals

http://www.flossmanuals.net
+ 31 6 2808 7108
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