[ProgSoc] TFM: Time For Modification Redux
Nathan de Vries
nathan at atnan.com
Tue Nov 10 17:39:10 EST 2009
On 10/11/2009, at 1:10 PM, Roland Turner wrote:
> Harsh. Self-defeating for chapters that aren't about LaTeX or SVN
> and it
> eliminates the immense benefits that turn out to exist in allowing
> reviewers/readers to make small corrections fast.
I agree with this. We've discussed rewriting the TFM before and it
always becomes a nerd-fest of questions about what SCM & markup
language to use, but this ignores the fundamental issues that have
held back a rewrite. Namely:
1. It's hard to get people to sit down and churn out content
2. It's hard to know what content to throw out and what to keep
3. It's hard to get people collaborating
Notice that none of these things have anything to do with technology?
Not only that, but SVN & LaTeX make all 3 problems even harder to solve.
Nicholas' suggestion of using Markdown (or a Markdown derivative) is
more realistic, because people are used to writing emails and Gruber
designed Markdown with that in mind. It becomes less about the markup
and more about what you're writing.
If you're thinking "but you can't write a book in Markdown", the Git
Community Book is a great example of one.
This is what a raw chapter looks like:
http://github.com/schacon/gitbook/raw/master/text/08_Basic_Branching_and_Merging/0_%20Basic_Branching_and_Merging.markdown
This is what it looks like using the simplistic Markdown formatter of
Github:
http://github.com/schacon/gitbook/blob/master/text/08_Basic_Branching_and_Merging/0_%20Basic_Branching_and_Merging.markdown
This is the final HTML exported result:
http://book.git-scm.com/3_basic_branching_and_merging.html
And the final PDF / print result:
http://book.git-scm.com/book.pdf
The hidden advantage of using Github is that anyone set as a
collaborator on the project can inline-edit the chapters and hit save,
and it's all version controlled. Others who want to work locally can
check out the project and work in their editor of choice, pushing and
pulling changes as they see fit.
Seems like a much more sane option to me.
Cheers,
Nathan de Vries
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