OpenCS Manual

[Zini]

The topic of the availability of the OpenCS manual has been brought up in the editor development forum. It is currently in a sorry state, but people have started working on it again. For future releases we should make publishing it part of the release process.
Also, is there any way that we can do something like a nightly build for the manual? Either in the form of a downloadable pdf file or maybe even html?

[K0kt409P]

Also, is there any way that we can do something like a nightly build for the manual? Either in the form of a downloadable pdf file or maybe even html?

A nightly pdf build is trivial. Have cron run something like this once every day and you're set:

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh

OPENMW_DIR=~/openmw

cd $OPENMW_DIR
git pull
cd manual/opencs
pdflatex main.tex
cp main.pdf /var/www/opencs-manual.pdf

Generating (pretty) html from latex is possible, but not trivial. I ran latex2html on main.tex to see how it would come out, and the result was OK-ish: http://bessman.se/opencs/
With some custom css it could be made to look rather nice.

[Tinker]

The topic of the availability of the OpenCS manual has been brought up in the editor development forum. It is currently in a sorry state, but people have started working on it again. For future releases we should make publishing it part of the release process.

I would say no. I think the vast majority of vanilla players never used TESCS and it will possibly be the same with OpenCS, in addition if the manual gets written it will very soon rival the size of the current programme, effectively doubling the size of the installer. Much better to link to the manual on the start page and in the help menu.

In any case I still think the manual would be best displayed on the site as a wiki or html but never a pdf, the first choice in producing a pdf is the page size, currently it is US letter which is slightly different to A4. Whichever format is chosen it will be wrong for half the world, especially if people actually want to print it. EPub is another option as it automatically reformats the layout to suit the reader size.

[Zini]

No one ever said anything about including the manual into the packages. We have a link for the manual download on our download page.

Anyway, I do not buy the size argument. First because size at this scale does not matter and second we currently include OpenCS in the OpenMW package anyway (at least on windows).