Revamp OpenMW PR content

Anything related to PR, release planning and any other non-technical idea how to move the project forward should be discussed here.
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Atahualpa
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Re: Revamp OpenMW PR content

Post by Atahualpa »

Thunderforge wrote: 10 Aug 2018, 22:32 The empty nodes are kind of odd. For instance, answer "Yes" on "Do they need any other programs that modify Morrowind.exe?" takes you through two empty nodes before being told that OpenMW isn't right for you.
Looks like imitating my LaTeX draft wasn't the best choice for the Mermaid layout after all. The empty nodes are very prominent indeed and the overall layout still looks very cluttered.
Thunderforge wrote: 10 Aug 2018, 22:32 Also, I took the first node of "Should you try OpenMW?" to be a question, then followed the line on the far right to the very bottom, looking for a choice, and then coming to "Please wait for the next release and check again". I had missed the direction of the arrow and thought it was a choice. Honestly, I think that the circular link could be deleted because people know it can be reviewed in the future.
I added the circular link to my LaTeX draft to emphasise the fact that OpenMW is ever-evolving thus making the "negative" decision a temporary one. Again, it works in LaTeX but not in the current Mermaid layout.


If this is the best we can get out of Mermaid, I'd suggest using LaTeX; we already have an almost complete LaTeX flow chart, so why not use it? Visual appearance over ease of maintenance - guys, this is no source code but a PR document which should be comprehensible for any player stumbling across it. Moreover, the chart will only change sporadically, so maintaining it won't be a problem.

Edit: It's actually not really about maintenance - we'd just host a .tex file which should be fine - but the fact that the LaTeX file needs to be externally compiled to produce the desired PDF document(s).
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lysol
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Re: Revamp OpenMW PR content

Post by lysol »

I realize I wasn't really clear enough in my last post (wrote it in a hurry), but yes, my point was that I tried to imitate Atahualpa's flowchart through Mermaid, and trying to do so made it look like crap. ;) I don't know how I could prevent lines crossing for example. And you can only define if you want to go from top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right or right to left. The most efficient way seems to be when you go a little bit here and there which, as far as I know, is impossible in Mermaid.

Mermaid is super cool for small, less complex flowcharts (and really practical when maintained by several people too), but I think it is too simple for this task. I personally vote for using LaTeX.

Oh, and @Thunderforge, did you see Atahualpa's flowchart?
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Thunderforge
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Re: Revamp OpenMW PR content

Post by Thunderforge »

lysol wrote: 11 Aug 2018, 06:57 Mermaid is super cool for small, less complex flowcharts (and really practical when maintained by several people too), but I think it is too simple for this task. I personally vote for using LaTeX.

Oh, and @Thunderforge, did you see Atahualpa's flowchart?
I did, which is why I commented on it earlier ;)

It's definitely the most clean version. While I don't particularly care for the empty nodes, it's not as big of a problem as it is for the Mermaid version. I'd be interested to see another version with the new text.

Ultimately, we'd want it in an image format so that it can be embedded in the FAQ. Vertical layout would probably be better for that, since we have limited horizontal space. Also, I think that ideally we should try to prevent the use of footnotes if we can, but if that's really the best option, then let's just accept that.
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Ravenwing
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Re: Revamp OpenMW PR content

Post by Ravenwing »

lysol wrote: 11 Aug 2018, 06:57 I realize I wasn't really clear enough in my last post (wrote it in a hurry), but yes, my point was that I tried to imitate Atahualpa's flowchart through Mermaid, and trying to do so made it look like crap.
Don't worry, lysol, it gave me a laugh!

But yes, I'm just not finding any way of making this work the way we'd like it to. At this point I think I'm in agreement with you all about using the Latex version. We can keep the .tex on GitLab and just locally generate it and upload for display. Please commit the .tex to the docs subdirectory but outside of the source subdirectory. If it's not a hassle can you comment in the file on how to generate the file locally? Like dependencies and any configurations we should know to implement?

Before we publish, I think the following would be good to figure out:
  • Vertical layout so it fits better embedded in the webpage
  • How to generate as SVG directly
  • Change font to match that of website
  • Do we want to embed this directly in FAQ? Or keep on the wiki and reference from other relevant places?
Regarding the SVG format, done properly, this should allow CSS formatting of the diagram and allow it to scale easily in different environments. I couldn't find much in the way of easily creating an SVG from Latex, but perhaps you know some better places to look. If you can't find anything, I can always convert in Illustrator from PDF to SVG, but the text formatting keeps getting screwed up.
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Thunderforge
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Re: Revamp OpenMW PR content

Post by Thunderforge »

Ravenwing wrote: 14 Aug 2018, 06:30 We can keep the .tex on GitLab and just locally generate it and upload for display.
Can AppVeyor or whatever CI framework we're using these days automatically generate this for us?
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