[FM Discuss] floss manuals publishing covers

[adam hyde]

hi

Karl asked last week if we could add customised covers to the
automatically generated PDF. So he and I tried a few things out and Karl
recommended a way that it would make sense in the interface and just
today i managed to implement it.

So...what this means is that you can now put your own cover on the PDF
that is linked from the published manuals. 

You can create your manual here:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/ManualCover

If you are a maintainer you will see the cover appear in a drop down
list in your manual repository. For example, Karl has created a cover
called "AlchemyCover" and you can see it here:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/ManualCover/AlchemyCover

Also, if you go here:
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Alchemy

and if you are logged in (and you are a maintainer) you will see a drop
down list on the left with the covers listed and a publish button.

You simply choose the cover and press publish. The html manual wont be
effected (the one linked from the front of FM) but the PDF will have
your new cover attached. If you don't choose a cover you get the
default.

There are two things you must do to use the PDF cover. I will work out a
way around these, probably quite soon, but for now you must do this:
1. the HTML of the cover must have this at the top:
<!-- PDFSTART -->
and this at the bottom:
<!-- PDFSTOP -->

otherwise you get messy metadata in the cover.

2. all images must have a full URL. Because the WYSIWYG editor strips
out full URLS and replaces them with relative URLS you need to first
place the image as you normally do and then save the file, then open it
with the 'text only' editor (linked on the left bar) and put:
"http://www.flossmanuals.net/" in from of the relative url.


I will resolve both of the above issues. But for now just observe these
two small issues and I will post when I have resolved them.

All covers also appear in the remix section and you can use these covers
for remixes. I will, at some stage, work out a nice way for this to be
managed so anyone can create their own covers. But for now the only ones
that can do it are the ones that read this list ;)

adam







-- 
Adam Hyde
FLOSS Manuals

http://www.flossmanuals.net