Formatting

Ok, I'm not too great with the formatting, but I can add a ton of content. You may wish to review/modify my contributions so that they are more clear/clean. We also need to come up with a common "feel" to the pages, so far ive been using<h2> tags for my headers(look at ps2ftp for instance), but I feel we need to set the "standard" and adhere to it on nearly every page. --ubergeek[Jan 4, 2007 12:43am EST]

Why don't we just use the WikiStyle formating? Like ! and !!, etc... By using WikiStyle the documents also get their structure auto-parsed, so we can get auto-generated Table of Contents for the page. What I've been trying to figure out a few minutes ago was that if we can get auto-generated TOC across pages, that is, an auto-generated TOC that detects all the pages on the wiki, categorizes and hierarchizes them into that TOC. I think that would be neat, but not really possible - it doesn't look like the PbWiki engine has page hierarchy support. But that's not a big deal anyway, we can just write a TOC manually when the time comes. For now, I think we should stick to the following COA:
1. Transfer the current official documentation to this wiki, as is, and make it available to the public as the "stable" version of the documentation;
2. Branch the "stable" documentation into a new version of the documentation, organizing and categorizing that version, splitting sections into pages, etc.;
3. After that branched version is fully organized, make it the "stable" version;
4. Start updating the "stable" documentation directly, to bring it up to the latest features of uLE - I don't think we'll need to branch it at this point anymore.

Now, to make a few points clear:

• The first "stable" version I refer to is basically the same documentation available for download on the ps2-scene forums, that is, the whole documentation on a single page. That should be pretty simple to do - I'll do it myself in the following hours.
• Why branch? Because when we get to the poing of splitting pages, categorize them, etc. at this point the docs will probably be a mess, aestetically and structurally speaking, and thus not suitable for refering to by the general public.
• After we have well organized version of the documentation, we can just scrap the older single-page-for-all-documentation verion, and start working on updates and extending the documentation as needed, directly on that new, organized version.

Well, I'm off to transfer the current doc to the wiki. I'd like to hear your comments about my suggestion for the COA. And speaking of suggestions, thanks for taking my suggestion on the forums for transfering the docs to a wiki - I didn't really think that idea would take-off as it did. Cheers! --Cronot[Jan 4, 2007 06:59am EST]

UPDATE: Gone as far as far as section 2b.III. Have some work to do, will finish it later. Comments please! --Cronot[Jan 4, 2007 08:45am EST]

 

That sounds like a good plan of attack, maybe for each "stable" release, someone maybe goes through the wiki and compiles it into a single downloadable file and we post it in the ule doc thread at ps2-scene, in case people want offline reading.

Also, for images, do we want them to all be attachemnts(I think we only get 10mb of space here, so that might be a issue). I was using my photobucket account for images, since it automatically creates thumbnails, or should we go with a different solution?

Almost forgot, nice work on the importing of the old docs, should be easy to split those up into sections, and add more content as we go along.--ubergeek[Jan 4, 2007 09:59am EST]

 

Ok, went a little bit further, but I'm still short on time. Just need to finish sections 3 and 4 (won't do 5 for now - I want to concentrate on documenting uLaunchELF operation for now, Changelogs will get a separate page anyway). I'll finish those later, as time allows.

 

[...]someone maybe goes through the wiki and compiles it into a single downloadable file[...]

 

Well, PbWiki as a "Save to PDF" feature, I could write a script that fetches the PDFied pages and joins them using the pdftk tool. The disavantage to this is that formatting won't be that good, and the resulting file will probably be 100Kb+. The nice thing about it is that this solution is mostly autonomous, and should be enough for most of those people who prefer to have the docs for offline viewing. Anyway, this is something for the future - first, I'd like to get the documentation fleshed out.

[...]Also, for images, do we want them to all be attachemnts(I think we only get 10mb of space here, so that might be a issue). I was using my photobucket account for images, since it automatically creates thumbnails, or should we go with a different solution?[...]

 

IMO, I think we should just use the space on the wiki. The current images weight on average 5Kb, and there aren't a lot of them, so I don't think we'll run out of space any time soon (take a look at the current space usage). We'll remove these images and upload new (updated) ones in the future anyway, and even then I don't think we'll get even near half the quota. Thumbnails would be useful if we'd display a long series of images in sequence, and I don't think we'll ever need to do that, at least for now. If we ever need either more space or thumbnails, then we'll think of something then. But I really prefer having full-sized images (or at least sized in a way that you can read the contents of the image), as this speeds up reading the docs and saves me from one more click and opening a new page just to view the image. That's just my opinion though. Maybe we should get the folks at the ps2-scene forums engaged in this discussion, so we can go for the preference of the majority, not only in these matters you brought up, but on others that will surely come up. --Cronot[Jan 4, 2007 04:22pm EST]

Just noticed that the "Save to PDF" feature doesn't save images... Too bad. Well, I'm sure that I can still whip up a script to generate the docs automatically though - it will just be more complicated... But, as I said before, I'd rather not worry about this for now. --Cronot[Jan 4, 2007 04:30pm EST]

I noticed at the bottom of the pages is a thing titled "Portfolios — Create PDFs, slideshows, and more from your wiki pages", It seems to let you make a large PDF based off of the multipled wiki pages, although I didn't try it.

Also, there has to be a better way to handle indentation then using a bunch of <ul> tags, as it might get a bit messy.

I personally prefer thumbnails, because some larger images disrupt the flow, and make it hard to follow the text. I see this being a problem if/when we start to add tutorials/guides/howto's, since they usually contain many images in sequence.(such as my ps2ftp mini tutorials).

I think I'll add the changelog page, and finish off the rest of the original documentation(If I find the time tonight)--ubergeek[Jan 4, 2007 09:08pm EST]

edit: I just finished adding a ChangeLog, as well as finishing off the original docs.--ubergeek[Jan 4, 2007 10:22pm EST]

[...] I noticed at the bottom of the pages is a thing titled "Portfolios — [...]

Yeah, just checked it out (and I see you did it too :-) ). But it looks like the images are ignored too. Oh well...

[...] Also, there has to be a better way to handle indentation then using a bunch of <ul> tags [...]

I wish there was, it really is messy. As per the Style Help, there isn't, and the PbWiki seems not to understand the standard convention used on Wikipedia for indentation (":").

 

As for the images, I guess you have a point, though I still think there are cases that I would stand by my preference. Maybe the best of both worlds is having images as small (on dimensions) as possible, trimming images to show only the interesting parts, when possible. Having a perfect flow won't really be possible, as this Wiki's engine formatting conventions constrains what we can do in this regard, unless we go down to coding HTML (which I'd rather not do - that would make the source messy). Anyway, again, I think this should be further discussed with more people involved with the documentation project. BTW, isn't "ps2dragon" on the ps2-scene forums one of or the responsible for the official documentation? I think he should be made aware of this discussion ASAP - it's his work we're publishing and extending, after all.

 

Oh, and good work with the documentation, and the changelogs! :-)

--Cronot[Jan 4, 2007 10:50pm EST]

 

Hey guys, the documentation already existed before I came along, I just wanted to put it all together in a single nicely formatted document. I also added some content, but I believe it was HyperSonic who started the original documentation. Anyway, I don't think that matters anyway, it's great that this is now in a wiki, much more easier to work on with everyone. When this is done, I plan on re-creating a new HTML/CSS document like the one I have in the ps2-scene forums, even if I'm the only one using it (it's my hobbie). I have to get some new screen shots together for the new changes since uLE v3.51. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but haven't gotten around to it, and will probably be my first goal. I just wanted to say thanks for working on the wiki, this is exactly what I think this project needed. I'll also try to go through a lot of the content and try to clean it up if necessary, since organizing and formatting is what I really like to do. I think most of the content is already in the ps2-scene forums, which I will try to go through and find important things to add when I get the time. Thanks for helping!

--ps2dragon [Jan 5, 2007 7:20pm EST]

BTW: Are you guys using some type of auto date command to generate the date next to your names? I created mine manually.

Im not using an autodate command, because I don't think there is one. As for the images, if you need any, I've got a tv tuner and can get a ton if you would like(or take some from my site, theres quite a few in the random guides/tutorials on that site. You can ignore the part on direct linking images in one of the posts, since I don't care if this wiki direct links.

The content is definitly in the ps2-scene forums, although I would think a great deal of it is in the 200+page long thread, and probably better suited for a faq.(speaking of faq, should the wiki include one?) I'm also beginning to think we are indenting too much on this talk page, there has to be a better way to differentate posts. I know we can seperate "topics" with horizontal rules(<hr>, or even the wiki command, forget what it is though), but we need something other then indenting. Maybe use !! name-date for each "post" and ! topic for each different discussion.

Good idea with recompiling it into a downloadable doc, as I'm sure that would benefit many people, as well as serve as a great backup.

--ubergeek[Jan 5, 2007 07:34pm EST]