[FM Discuss] Recommendations for switching to a good documentation system for US Peace Corps Philippines

[adam]

hey Micah,

I think that book sprint 'guide' is not really very good. Do you want 
to talk next week and we can talk about sprints...

adam

On Thu 25 Apr 2013 02:35:29 AM NZST, James Simmons wrote:
> Micah,
>
>
> If your documents are Word docs you should be able to save them as
> HTML, then run kindlegen on them.  I have done this for several books
> that are only available as web pages and the results are quite
> readable.  If you want a little more control over formatting you might
> get the free program Sigil and use that to convert the HTML to an
> EPUB, then run kindlegen on that.  If there are images in your docs
> you might need to resize them with The GIMP.  600 pixels wide should
> be workable on a Kindle.
>
> I am writing a novel and the method I use to convert from Libre Office
> to Kindle is pretty much what I described.  HTML, then EPUB using
> Sigil, then Kindlegen.  Since I plan to sell the Kindle version and
> care about formatting I wrote a Python script to strip out extra junk
> in the HTML before feeding ity to Sigil.  I can give you that script
> if you like.
>
> James Simmons
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 4:00 AM, Micah Roth <micah.roth at ucla.edu
> <mailto:micah.roth at ucla.edu>> wrote:
>
>     Dear flossmanuals,
>
>     My name is Micah Roth. I am a US Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV)
>     currently serving in the Philippines. Peace Corps Philippines has
>     recently decided to initiate the move to ereaders instead of
>     hard-copy training materials for our training events.They saw that
>     the ereader model they bought (the 6" Kindle 3 standard, I
>     believe) has support for PDF and figured they could just save
>     their doc/docx files as PDF and be done with it. When that failed
>     miserably, somebody asked me what they could do about it and I've
>     been researching the process for a few months in my extra time.
>
>     I have discovered many references on the Internet to markup-style
>     documentation methods that incorporate DITA and Docbook, but
>     haven't really found a good way to teach people to use those
>     systems. I found Wikipedia's export to epub function and what
>     plugins would be required to make a local installation of
>     mediawiki do that, but I'm not sure this is the best method. And
>     of course, I found the awesome booksprint concept and I have read
>     a bit about Booki, Pressbooks, and Booktype - but don't know what
>     tool to choose. I would really appreciate any feedback on this
>     stuff I can get.
>
>     This is coming to a head because I was told today that we will
>     have two official booksprints: one for Education, and another for
>     Children-Youth-Families and Environment. These booksprints will be
>     to create the Technical Binder used for the next batch of
>     Volunteers' main trainig events. Unfortunately, nobody knows how
>     to actually *do* a booksprint - at this point, it's just a word.
>     So, is there like a manual out there for how to set up and execute
>     a booksprint? If they don't have guidance all that's going to end
>     up happening is everybody plopping .doc/.docx files in a folder
>     and then one unlucky soul copy-pasting them all into one giant
>     doc, and then printing it. Oy, disastre.
>
>     I will be available to attend one of the booksprints (the second
>     one I mentioned) and I have been asked to facilitate it - so any
>     instructions, advice, tips, etc would be highly welcome, since
>     this is my first rodeo.
>
>     Thanks a ton!
>
>     ~Micah
>
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>
>
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