[FM Discuss] State of the english Flossmanuals

[Mick FM]

On 17/06/15 16:16, Mark Hancock wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This is purely free thinking and I’ve had a lot of green tea today, but is there any way FLOSS manuals could move over to GitHub for production? I’m imagining there are several reasons not to, but it is stable and I know a few people are using it to write manuals these days.
>
> Happy for someone to point out something really obvious that I’ve not realised about this idea.
>
> Cheers
>
> M

Hi Mark,

This is a good point. There are some good solutions out there for those
able to use MarkUp and git.
These are really getting a lot of pick up. eg.

https://www.gitbook.com/
https://readthedocs.org/

I'm ccing Simon as I realise that I forgot to answer a similar email he
sent a while ago asking the same kind of question.

I think this is a good choice for many projects especially for technical
projects where they are documented mainly by coders.

I personally don't think it's good for FM as really we want to lower
barriers to writing docs, so having to use git, or mark up doesn't
really fit the bill. 

I'd be really interested to know what other people think of other
options and how they stack up against Booktype.

The preview I've had of Booktype 2.0 is looking good and I think we've
found a solution to the current hole we are in which would involve
minimal complexity of migrating the data (which has really held us up so
far)

I'd also be interested to know what people thought were the essential
features for a diverse, low entry point, collaborative writing community
such as FM. For me some of the musts are:

* what you see is what you get editor (no mark up code knowledge needed)
* easy way to upload and place images
* simple web log in, and writing workflow
* ability to leave with your book (ie export an epub or similar)
* ability to import your book (ie epub import or similar)

nice one
Mick

-- 
Mick Chesterman - mick at flossmanuals.net
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