New Scribus Manual

[tim_occ]

Hi all,

A few days ago, I started a small side project to port the Scribus manual to a Sphinx based documentation using reStructuredText language.
I pushed the ported manual to my personal GitHub account, see here: https://github.com/nitramr/scribus-manual. (would be cool if we can move it to the official Scribus repo)

In addition, I set up a "read the docs" account to automatically publish the documentation, see the result here. https://scribus-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Each change on GitHub will trigger an auto update of the Read The Docs version.

Currently, localisation is not supported yet, but I'm working on it.


What are the benefits of having the documentation in Sphinx format?
1. The documentation source can compile in different output formats, like html, pdf or epub
2. Sphinx has a compiler log to show unused files, missing files or broken formatting
3. Documentation localisation will work in the same way as the main Scribus localisation (po files) and could be translated via Transifex too.
4. Read the Docs support documentation versioning based on GitHub branches.

[a.l.e]

hallo tim_occ,

if i understand you correctly, your plan is to move into this repository (and update) the (rather old) official scribus manual.

sadly, there is a major problem with that scribus documentation: it is not free in the sense of free software.
the most important consequence is that it won't included in the linux distributions (it's sometimes in the non-free repositories, but does not get automatically installed).

personally, i have a second issue with the official manual: it contains too much content that is not strictly speaking about scribus (but more an introduction to DTP) and this makes it harder to keep it up to date and translate.

in my eyes, if we want to have a modern manual for scribus, i would suggest to start from "initiation à scribus".
(sorry, i can't find it right now online, but i have a local copy on my computer...)

it's a fine, small, introduction to scribus that is released under the GPL license (not ideal either, but better than the custom license of the official documentation).
if you change your mind, i have parts of the book already translated into english and converted to markdown.

[tim_occ]

Hi ale,

honestly, I didn't really check the license. Big mistake from my side. I guess to use the current documentation as a foundation is not the best idea.

In the next days, I can set up a new empty documentation project and connect this with Read The Docs. Also, I want to see how others can contribute easily.

Do you mean this manual?
https://github.com/aoloe/scribus-book-starting-with

[tim_occ]

Update: I created a new blank documentation.

https://scribus-manual.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

Now, the source code is hosted on Codeberg https://codeberg.org/Scribus/scribus-manual
But the automation works in the same way as with GitHub.