Re: Swarm User Guide (was Re: built in rv objects -- "bug" in documenation)

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "AL" == Alex Lancaster <address@hidden> writes:

AL> Paul, Benedikt and I can function as both
AL> contributors (I'm hoping to write some material on the activity
AL> library, for example) and editors (I will also double on the
AL> production side, putting things in SGML, as I can understand that
AL> most people won't want to contribute in SGML form directly).

The value of this production side support should NOT be underestimated. 
We use a complex SGML markup system and many tools to create the Swarm
documentation.  Transforming plain text to our system is a non-trivial
service.  It's analogous to code cleanup and integration.

But I think it is also worth pointing out that documentation build
environment is usable without all this knowledge.  It should be
feasible for contributors to do simple localized editing and rebuilds
(e.g. to HTML and PostScript) using the swarmdocs package. 

It is easy, for example, to build all the Swarm documentation output
using just the `build-swarmdocs' script distributed on the Swarm 1.3.1
CD-ROM.  All the necessary tools (prebuilt for Windows) are on the
1.3.1 CD-ROM, and will be on the 1.4.1 CD-ROM as well.  We've gone to
a *LOT* of trouble to make sure that everything we do with the
documentation can be done with minimal fuss by any user with a Swarm CD-ROM.

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