Documentation

[John Ralls]

On Jan 18, 2014, at 11:23 AM, John R. Sowden <jsowden at americansentry.net> wrote:

> On 01/18/2014 10:23 AM, Cristian Marchi wrote:
>> Il 18/01/2014 18:58, John R. Sowden ha scritto:
>>> Is a copy of the doc available in a format that I can modify for my use?
>> Sure, as it is open source and licensed under GPL. The source (and editable) files of GnuCash documentation are available in the git docs repo [1]
>> The documentation is written in docbook (an widely used XML format for documentation).
>> A server builds automatically html, pdf, epub and mobi documentation files starting from the xml files in the git repo.
>> 
>> Regards
>> Cristian
>> 
>> [1] https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash-docs
>> 
>> 
> I went to that location, but all I found was little pieces of the guide or help files.  I will spend years bringing all that together into a document.  Then, when it is changed, since it is locked into special formats, I will have to start all over (the doc I saw was for version 2.5, as best as I could tell).  Is there an ASCII format (open unstructured, unformatted text)?
> 
> The kinds of modifications that I want to make are:
> deleting the references to quicken/quick books (I don't use them).
> deleting the references to currency changes (I only use one currency).
> deleting the references to on line banking services, etc. (I don't integrate on line accounting into my GL).
> deleting references to personal finance (my use is for my business).
> add examples of my use into howtos
> rewording explanations of how to deal with reports (bring up a report-get an error which I have to figure out means to go elsewhere and set up the report-do the setup-go back and get the report).
> Explanation of how to use gc for my specific business, including references to my other accounting documents.
> 
> References was made to "external tools" to convert to different formats, but it seems they referred only to the 4 locked ones.
> 
> Am I the only one who has these thoughts?

I suppose you want to make a manual for your employees.

No, we don’t have any reason to have a build tool to make ASCII documents, but Geert found a free-as-in-beer WYSIWYG DocBook editor which I was able to use to make a couple of patches: http://sourceforge.net/projects/sernafree.mirror/
It pulls all of the pieces together into a single super-document for editing and display. Once you’d made your edits you could use the provided tools to put the result in a distributable format.

Regards,
John Ralls