Re: Introduction

[Jason Stover]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 04:23:29PM -0700, Angela Oppenheim wrote:
> I am an aspiring technical writer and was introduced to this list through
> Karl Barry and John Darrington.  I hope to help with documentation on the
> PSPP project.  I am new to volunteer projects like this, so feel free to
> forward any suggestions for ways to be productive in my participation.

Thanks for the offer, PSPP could use more documentation. Right now,
there isn't as much attention paid to the manual, or the wiki, as to
the source code.

To get started, download the source code following the instructions at
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/pspp/. The manual is in the 'doc'
directory, and is built with a program called texinfo
(www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/).  Learning all about texinfo takes a
while, but I found that I can write sections of the manual by using
the texinfo source in 'doc' as examples to start with.

There is also a wiki at http://sakla.net. It could use some work.

As long as we are on the topic of the manual, I read a suggestion a
while ago for how to organize a good manual. Unfortunately, I can't
find the reference now, but if I remember correctly, it said a manual
should contain about five sections: Introduction, tutorial, syntax
definition, and a couple of others I can't remember.  It looked good
at the time, anyway. Does anyone know whose idea this was (and what
the sections were)?

-Jason