[ZDP] local Zope Documentation

[Alexandre Ratti]

Hi Jimmie,


At 10:31 18/03/2000 -0600, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
>I have looked at and downloaded your PDF compilation. I had some
>problems with it that I can't remember at the moment. Unfortunately I
>had to download it to my wife's Mac at home because it is the computer
>of mine with a printer. I have a big problem printing PDFs on that Mac.
>Printing 20 pages of a PDF can create a 200-400mb spool file from a
>100+k document. Yuck! This is with Acrobat 4, Acrobat 3 does not have
>this problem. But Acrobat 3 doesn't do odd and even pages.


And the tool I use outputs Acrobat 4 files.

>:(  Since I
>moved everything to a 10gb drive I have less problems.
>
>One issue I have with the compilation is that it is difficult to print
>what you want selectively. It would be nice if it were organized
>topically rather than by date or title which are generally irrelevant
>since it doesn't group them into any logical structure.

Yes, I agree topics are needed. The problem is that I just batch download 
the Howtos from a list I generated from the Catalog on the Zope site and I 
convert them to PDF. I do not manually reorder the docs.

If the howtos were somehow sorted on the Zope site I could batch convert 
them into a PDF with a logical structure.


>How about grouping by:
>DTML
>SQL
>ZClasses
>etc.
>
>It would be nice if we could adopt some documentation conventions which
>would automatically enable categorization of documents. A nice little
>metadata flag category='SQL' or some such. Of course I may have not
>caught up on my reading yet and it's already available. If so my
>apologies.

Actually, I just remembered that the user is required to select topics when 
creating a Howto on the Zope site. Here is the code for the pick list:

<select name="HowTo_topics:list" multiple size=5>
        <option value="DTML">DTML</option>
        <option value="Acquisition">Acquisition</option>
        <option value="ZPublisher">ZPublisher</option>
        <option value="SQL Methods">SQL Methods</option>
        <option value="Z Classes" selected>Z Classes</option>
        <option value="ZServer">ZServer</option>
        <option value="ZCatalog" selected>ZCatalog</option>
        <option value="Installation">Installation</option>
        <option value="UNIX">UNIX</option>
        <option value="NT">NT</option>
        <option value="Zope.org">Zope.org</option>
</select>

Somehow this information isn't used anywhere on the Zope site AFAIK. If the 
"HowTo_topics" property is indexed in the Catalog we could generate a 
structured Howto list on the Zope site and use it to generate a structured 
PDF.

I will check if I can access this information in the zope.org Catalog.


>I am not putting down your compilation. I thoroughly appreciate the work
>you did putting it together. But when I went to print it, I had no way
>to logically select groupings of pages for a subject.

You feedback is welcome and I agree that logical groupings are badly 
needed. Without any structuring, the many Zope docs are very difficult to use.


>In addition to grouping your 'all' how-tos topically, how about offering
>smaller groupings topically? So that if some needs to improve their DTML
>zen they can download the 'all-dtml-how-tos.pdf' and print. :)

This can be done if the howtos are ordered automatically on the Zope site.

If they aren't, topical lists for Howtos, Tips, etc. would need to be 
manually maintained on a monthly basis. Any volunteer? ;-)

This discussion is related to the "keywords/topics" discussion for ZDP 
resources. We could use "Link" objects on ZDP to point to Zope resources 
such as Howtos, Tips, reviews on other sites, etc. Topics properties could 
be set on the Link objects to provide logical groupings (cf. system 
described by David).
We'd nee to maintain these Link objects manually, though.

This might be a practical solution to offer structured Zope resources 
before Howtos are somehow integrated into a ZDP doc system. Any thoughts?


Cheers.

Alexandre