Documentation:Developers Notes

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Introduction

Anyone can get involved. Have your noticed something that's not quite right? Direct edits are not allowed. Each page has a header/footer with a link to that documents talk page.

The rest of this document is an outline of the process used to generate the content of the documentation repository.

The Source

The html files used to generate this content came from the current documentation generation process (povdocgen) input side files.

The Content

The repository documents were produced by a perl script (makedocs.pl). It converts the html files into MediaWiki markup language preserving POV-centric tags that are critical to the final creation of distribution documentation sets. MediaWiki markup understands many standard html tags, so by in large most things get passed on as-is, however there are some exceptions that are covered in the tag summary below.

Server Configuration Changes

When this change is implemented .... links should open in a new window.

Tag Summary

This section is a list of the tags, by classification, with a brief synopsis of how it was handled and why.

MUST Preserve

These tags are for indexing and searching purposes. They are critical to down stream processes.

These is have no end user viewable information so they are commented out.

The end user sees this tag as an Intra-Wiki navigational link, so ....

<linkto "Introduction">Introduction</linkto>

becomes

[[Documentation:SomePage#Introduction|Introduction]]

Style Sheet Issue's

The content will not resemble the Windows distribution, or the online version due to style sheet issues. If making the repository pages look like the distribution is an issue, then integrating elements of povray35.css should be considered, or maybe this would be a great opportunity to change the look of the documentation!

These are just some tags/classes I'm talking about:

class="Explain"
<code></code>
<pre></pre>
class="Note"
Others ....

Left Justified

There were a number of html tags that just didn't work as you'd expect, until the became the first character of a new line. There are also certain wiki tags that have the same requirement, so I had to get rid of leading tabs and spaces.

Pending Issues

get some QA help from the user community.
looking for PHP programmers.

Completed Tasks

tested wiki export/import functionality between Sandbox and the POV Wiki
posted initial chapter table of contents files.
front end makedocs.pl script.
uploaded the documentation sets image files.