[FM Discuss] documenting Booktype

[Daniel James]

Hi Adam,

> please refer to the comments I made to the ticket you made in
> the Booktype issue tracker.
> 
> http://dev.sourcefabric.org/browse/BK-120

Thanks, I've added a comment:

"The 'read' material need not be live if it is versioned, like the draft
interface. The simplest implementation would be to remove the 'draft'
background graphic from this view:

http://booktype-demo.sourcefabric.org/algebra-an-algorithmic-treatment/_draft/_v/1.0/chapter-1-the-language-of-mathematics/

So when the book is versioned, the author(s) would have the choice to
point the 'read' link at the current live version, or the previous
versioned draft. This is a neat solution because only the book owner can
create new drafts."

Personally, I cannot use the current 'draft' view for anything, because
the background graphic makes proof-reading very difficult. That 'draft'
view is well integrated with the edit interface though, with an edit
link on every chapter.

>> Right, but FM does not have that feature at the moment. Each time I use
>> bookipublisher, I'm forking a static version which does not get updated
>> until I fork again.
> 
> it is not a fork, it is a copy of a specific moment.

Any changes to the exported HTML version are not returned to the
Booktype version. Therefore it's a fork, in my 'book' :-)

The weakness of a star topology (Booktype at the centre feeds updates to
peripheral HTML sites) is that should anything happen to the original
Booktype server, the maintainers of the static HTML sites have lost the
ability to continue producing the books, other than going back to
conventional editing. It's a producer/consumer model, rather than the
distributed many-producer model I was suggesting.

Cheers!

Daniel