Re: the php manual....

Toby Butzon wrote: > With all due respect, I don't see why that would be beneficial. I > personally like browsing the manual online; it's searchable, it's > up-to-date, and it's well organized. > Hiring a publishing company, etc., requires an investment of time and > money.... > > David Elrom wrote: > > I think the PHP manual should be published and sold for no profit... > > (sold for the price of making the book...) Why? It's more portable, and low bandwidth, to have it on paper.... if somebody really wants an offline, printed, copy, they can simply grab the PDF version, and print it out themselves, or take it to an AlphaGraphics or Kinkos/instyPrints/KwikKopy/whatever and have them print out and bind a copy, for minimal personal costs. It's only 1041 pages, so it should be less than the $50+ USD of the average tech manual. Since I'm heavily entrenched in there (AG, my biggest client for PHP consulting work), I've actually debated making this into something they can sell/advertise their services with, as they already do this kind of work for some other large documents with worldwide readership, but I've never really gotten that far with the idea (which also works quite well for other open-source manuals, print-on-demand is a very good thing for documentation that changes frequently).... anybody know who the folks at sourceforge are? Anyways.... Until such a system gets built, most competant "business-documents companies" can run these things fairly cheap, and in most cases, for less cost than a decent O'Reilly/Wrox/whomever book would cost to buy. The only problems I've seen so far with the PDF manual are high characters (Stig's name, for example. ;-) ). Which also introduces the questions: 1. What would it take to get the PDF versions into other languages besides english? 2. Why isn't the PDF version being served on a page-by-page basis, as well as one big file? It sure would be nice to only put together a printed manual of the pages you want (i.e, If you're only using MySQL, it would save a lot of paper if you didn't print the Oracle, Postgres, Ovrimos, etc. sections.) -Ronabop -- Personal: ron@opus1.com, 520-326-6109, http://www.opus1.com/ron/ Work: rchmara@pnsinc.com, 520-546-8993, http://www.pnsinc.com/ The opinions expressed in this email are not necessarily those of myself, my employers, or any of the other little voices in my head.