/[svn]/doc/docbase/writing_docs/01_writing_docs.html
ViewVC logotype

Contents of /doc/docbase/writing_docs/01_writing_docs.html

Parent Directory Parent Directory | Revision Log Revision Log


Revision 2733 - (show annotations) (download) (as text)
Sun Apr 26 23:49:16 2015 UTC (8 years, 11 months ago) by schoenebeck
File MIME type: text/html
File size: 36296 byte(s)
- "Writing Docs" article: minor structure change.

1 <html>
2 <head>
3 <meta name="author" content="Christian Schoenebeck">
4 <title>Writing Docs</title>
5 <meta name="description" content="Writing new articles for this site.">
6 </head>
7 <body>
8 <p>
9 This article provides a short introduction about how to write documents
10 for this site. We appreciate any volunteers trying to help us writing
11 documentation for LinuxSampler and friends.
12 </p>
13
14 <h3>At a Glance</h3>
15 <p>
16 There are plenty of documentation systems out there. Why did we need yet
17 another one? Most of those systems require you to learn some kind of custom,
18 exotic markup language to write documents with them. Then there are
19 <i title="<u><b>W</b>hat <b>Y</b>ou <b>S</b>ee <b>I</b>s <b>W</b>hat <b>Y</b>ou <b>G</b>et:</u> A system that immediately shows you the result while creating content.">
20 WYSIWG
21 </i> systems which require to maintain user accounts for people who want to
22 add or change content and are suffering under periodic security issues,
23 which in turn require frequent software updates to avoid the site getting
24 compromised. And last but not least; they don't deliver everything you
25 need and are often hard to extend or to be customized.
26 </p>
27 <p>
28 <img src="new_article.png" style="height:112px; margin-right:15px;">
29 This site is using one of the best, most flexible, and well known markup
30 languages as basis for writing documents:
31 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML">HTML</a>. But obviously there
32 are some caveats to use HTML as-is. Most notably it requires you to write
33 a lot of monothonic, superfluous things again and again just to achieve
34 simple things. And on the other hand it requires authors to invest a
35 substantial amount of time learning the numerous required aspects of HTML
36 and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets">CSS</a>.
37 Fortunately; you don't have to. You don't need to have any precognition
38 of HTML or CSS to write articles for this site.
39 </p>
40 <p>
41 Here are some of the features of our documentation system in overview:
42 <ul>
43 <li>
44 Articles are created as plain and extremely simple HTML files, which
45 do not neccessarily require any previous knowledge in HTML
46 (or even CSS) by article authors.
47 </li>
48 <li>
49 The article's HTML file can immediately be previewed on the author's
50 local computer by just opening it with a browser. No upload or web
51 application required while creating or editing articles.
52 </li>
53 <li>
54 Once the article is ready, it can be submitted to our server, which
55 will then be filled up automatically by our software to generate our
56 documentation site. The software performs all redundant work that is
57 usually required to build websites with regular HTML files. This
58 automatic generation supports the following features:
59 <ol>
60 <li>
61 Automatic generation of the site's article structure. The site's
62 structure can very easily be changed, by just moving around the
63 article source HTML files in the article source repository. No single
64 article needs to be edited for any site structure changes.
65 </li>
66 <li>
67 Automatic correction of links and image references in articles,
68 i.e. on site structure changes, trivial input errors or file type
69 changes. No user interventation required.
70 </li>
71 <li>
72 Automatic syntax highlighting of source code snippets in articles,
73 so the author can concentrate simply on the content and correctness
74 of his source code snippets. The software
75 generates the correct look of your source code examples for you.
76 </li>
77 <li>
78 Automatic generation of site's navigation bar, article's table of
79 contents and article section IDs for the entire website.
80 </li>
81 <li>
82 Automated generation of tooltips for links to other articles and
83 technical terms or abbreviations.
84 </li>
85 <li>
86 Automatic detection of fundamental errors in articles. Our system
87 tries to correct any kind of issues automatically as much and as far
88 as possible, in order to avoid bothering article authors with any kind of trivial
89 things. However there are cases where it simply cannot resolve
90 issues with individual articles on its own, even not by "guessing".
91 In this case it will notify the author(s) about the precise problem,
92 so they are aware about it and asks them to do the manual correction.
93 </li>
94 <li>
95 This site's software is written in native C++, it generates and
96 updates the entire site extremely fast. And since it is only
97 updating the site's files when some input article changed, it can
98 also be run as unpriviliged user and/or in a sandbox environment.
99 </li>
100 </ol>
101 </li>
102 <li>
103 The site's template is a regular, static HTML file. So you can edit and
104 test the site's overall look with a regular browser. No need to comment
105 in/out things just for changing the general look of the site.
106 </li>
107 <li>
108 Extensible: all articles are still real HTML after all. So you can
109 easily add any kind of HTML, CSS and Java Script on your own for
110 individual articles of yours if really required. So it is not neccessarily
111 required to change our site's software just to add some kind of customization
112 for some of your articles.
113 </li>
114 </ul>
115 </p>
116 <p>
117 Enough said, let's dive in and actually see how to create an article.
118 </p>
119
120 <h2>A Base Article</h2>
121 <p>
122 Creating a new article for this site is as simple as creating a new text
123 file and adding following text:
124 </p>
125 <code l="html">
126 <h1>My First Article</h1>
127 <p>
128 This is the first paragraph.
129 </p>
130 </code>
131 <p>
132 This would already be sufficient to be a valid document and all the rest
133 would automatically be added by our site's software for you. It is
134 recommended though to start new documents always with following template
135 instead:
136 </p>
137 <code>
138 &lt;html&gt;
139 &lt;head&gt;
140 &lt;title>??article-title??&lt;/title&gt;
141 &lt;meta name="author" content="??author-name??"&gt;
142 &lt;meta name="description" content="??short-description??"&gt;
143 &lt;link rel="stylesheet" href="http://doc.linuxsampler.org/css/preview.css"&gt;
144 &lt;script type="text/javascript" src="http://doc.linuxsampler.org/js/preview.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
145 &lt;/head&gt;
146 &lt;body&gt;
147 <h1>??article-headline??</h1>
148 <p>
149 This is the first paragraph.
150 </p>
151 &lt;/body&gt;
152 &lt;/html&gt;
153 </code>
154 <p>
155 Add this to an empty text file and rename the file to a HTML file with
156 arbitrary name like <code>my_first_article.html</code>.
157 That template above has the advantage that you can simply open that file
158 locally on your machine with your web browser and immediately preview how
159 the article will look like on our website while you are writing the
160 article. So you don't need to upload it somewhere for that purpose.
161 </p>
162 <p>
163 Don't worry, you don't need to understand everything that's there. All you
164 need to know is described next.
165 </p>
166
167 <h3>Article Short Description</h3>
168 <p>
169 You may provide a short description of your article with
170 <code>??short-description??</code>. This is completely optional. It is used
171 for example when your article is linked from another article. In that
172 case the reader may i.e. move the mouse pointer over the link and a tooltip
173 will popup with the document's title and the short description as summary
174 of what that article is about.
175 </p>
176
177 <h3>Article Title</h3>
178 <p>
179 With <code>??article-title??</code> you provide the title of the article,
180 which will be displayed in the browser's window title bar and it will also
181 be displayed on our site's horizontal navigation bar, which you can find
182 at the top of each page. It will also be used by our site to auto generate
183 a directory structure for the generated website, thus it also has an
184 impact on the final <i>URL</i> of your article.
185 </p>
186 <p>
187 With <code>??article-headline??</code> you define the prominent headline
188 shown at the very beginning of the article.
189 </p>
190 <p>
191 In most cases <code>??article-title??</code> and
192 <code>??article-headline??</code> will probably be the same text for one
193 article. In that case you may also omit either one of the two. The
194 software will then automatically add the missing headline or title for
195 you.
196 </p>
197 <p>
198 In some few cases you may want to have more control over the aspects of
199 the article's title, its final URL path and what shall be displayed in
200 the navigation bar. In this case you may use some additional optional tags
201 in your document's head like this:
202 </p>
203 <code>
204 &lt;html&gt;
205 &lt;head&gt;
206 &lt;title>??article-title??&lt;/title&gt; <!-- article's title -->
207
208 &lt;urlpath>??article-path??&lt;/urlpath&gt; <!-- article's directory (in URL path) -->
209
210 &lt;navpath>??nav-bar-name??&lt;/navpath&gt; <!-- article's name in navigation bar -->
211
212 &lt;meta name="author" content="John Smith"&gt;
213 &lt;meta name="description" content="This is my first article."&gt;
214 &lt;link rel="stylesheet" href="http://doc.linuxsampler.org/css/preview.css"&gt;
215 &lt;script type="text/javascript" src="http://doc.linuxsampler.org/js/preview.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;
216 &lt;/head&gt;
217 &lt;body&gt;
218 <h1>??article-headline??</h1>
219 <p>
220 This is the first paragraph.
221 </p>
222 &lt;/body&gt;
223 &lt;/html&gt;
224 </code>
225 <p>
226 In this case, <code>??article-title??</code> is now only used for displaying the
227 article's name in the browser's title bar and in case the reader
228 bookmarks your article with his browser.
229 <code>??article-path??</code> is the directory
230 name where the final, generated article shall be place at. Accordingly
231 this also changes the final URL to the article. And last but not least,
232 <code>??nav-bar-name??</code> defines the name of your article as it shall
233 be displayed on the site's navigation bar. As said, these additional tags
234 are completely optional. In most cases you should be fine by just providing
235 a <code>&lt;title&gt;</code> and/or <code>&lt;h1&gt;</code> with your
236 article.
237 </p>
238
239 <h3>Article Authors</h3>
240 <p>
241 Also completely optional is providing <code>??author-name??</code> as
242 name(s) of the person(s) who wrote the article. If you provide that information,
243 then the name will be displayed in the footer section of the article on
244 our site. Don't be shy and add your name to get credited for your work.
245 If you change an already existing article, you may simply add your name
246 by adding a comma like so:
247 </p>
248 <code>
249 &lt;meta name="author" content="John Doe, Bob Fox, Mary Smith"&gt;
250 </code>
251 <p>
252 The author information may also be useful for people to contact the person
253 who wrote the original article in order to ask some questions about it.
254 </p>
255
256 <h2>Headlines</h2>
257 <p>
258 All headlines in your article are defined with regular HTML headline
259 tags. The following three headline types are available:
260 </p>
261 <ol>
262 <li><code><h1>??article-headline??</h1></code> Like described in the
263 previous section, a <code><h1></code> headline is the most prominent
264 headline of your article. It should only be used once; at the very
265 beginning of your article to display the general topic of the article.
266 </li>
267 <li><code><h2>??sub-headline??</h2></code> This headline type is a bit
268 less prominent than a <code><h1></code> headline. You may use
269 <code><h2></code> headlines to introduce important sections
270 of your article.
271 </li>
272 <li><code><h3>??sub-sub-headline??</h3></code> This is the least
273 prominent headline type. You may use it to further subdivide your
274 article in smaller sections.
275 </li>
276 </ol>
277 <p>
278 This is the corresponding look for each one of the three headline types:
279 </p>
280 <example>
281 <h1>This is a &lt;h1&gt; headline</h1>
282 <h2>This is a &lt;h2&gt; headline</h2>
283 <h3>This is a &lt;h3&gt; headline</h3>
284 </example>
285 <p>
286 It's completely up to you which one of those three headline types to use,
287 how often you use them and where. All of them will be taken by the site's
288 software to automatically generate a table of content of your Article,
289 which will be shown at the left side next to your article on our site.
290 </p>
291 <p>
292 Once your article is uploaded to our site, IDs for the individual
293 headlines will automatically be generated for you. If for example you had
294 somewhere in your article a headline called "Conclusion of Topic", then
295 this particular paragraph of your article may be directly linked to from
296 other articles or other sites with an URL like
297 <code>http://doc.linuxsampler.org/path/to/your/article/#conclusion_of_topic</code>.
298 If you want to override this behavior, because you rather want to use your
299 own ID for a paragraph of your article, then simply set the desired ID with
300 your headline:
301 </p>
302 <code>
303 <h3 id="my_conclusion">Conclusion of topic</h3>
304 </code>
305
306 <h2>Paragraphs</h2>
307 <p>
308 You should wrap each continous text block of your article in between
309 a paragraph tag pair like:
310 </p>
311 <code>
312 <p>
313 This is a paragraph. All the text in a paragraph is combined to one continous
314 text block. You may add as much text as you want to a paragraph of your article,
315 but better separate you article into logical parts of separate paragraphs. So to start a
316 new paragraph, wrap the next text block into a new pair of paragraph tags.
317 </p>
318 <p>
319 This is the next paragraph. There will be an empty line between this paragraph and
320 the previous and next paragraph, to separate paragraphs visually from each other.
321 </p>
322 </code>
323 <p>
324 Which would look like:
325 </p>
326 <example>
327 <p>
328 This is a paragraph. All the text in a paragraph is combined to one continous
329 text block. You may add as much text as you want to a paragraph of your article,
330 but better separate you article into logical parts of separate paragraphs. So to start a
331 new paragraph, wrap the next text block into a new pair of paragraph tags.
332 </p>
333 <p>
334 This is the next paragraph. There will be an empty line between this paragraph and
335 the previous and next paragraph, to separate paragraphs visually from each other.
336 </p>
337 </example>
338 <p>
339 Wrapping paragraphs into <code><p>??text??</p></code> blocks not only causes
340 trivial new lines in between them. This construct also allows you to easily
341 define whether certain additional content like images and source code
342 examples shall be shown directly embedded within the text block or shall
343 rather be shown separately outside of text blocks, like described next.
344 </p>
345
346 <h2>Pictures</h2>
347 <p>
348 To display i.e. screen shots, figures and other kinds of images in your
349 article, simply place the picture file in the directory where your
350 current article's file is located at. Then add the image to your article
351 with an <code><img src="some_picture.png"></code> HTML tag. There are two
352 distinct ways to do that, like described below.
353 </p>
354 <h3>Stand-Alone Pictures</h3>
355 <p>
356 To place a picture on
357 its own between two text paragraphs, simply place the <code><img></code>
358 tag between the two paragraphs in your HTML file:
359 </p>
360 <code>
361 <p>
362 This is the first paragraph. Just before the picture.
363 </p>
364
365 <img src="some_picture.png" caption="??footnote??" title="??tooltip-text??">
366
367 <p>
368 This is the next paragraph, just after the picture.
369 </p>
370 </code>
371 <p>
372 The optional <code>??footnote??</code> adds a footnote text just below the
373 image and the optional <code>??tooltip-text??</code> defines a text which
374 will popup if the reader points his mouse over the image. The previous
375 example would look like this:
376 </p>
377 <example>
378 <p>
379 This is the first paragraph. Just before the picture.
380 </p>
381 <img src="a_picture.png" caption="Some Explanation" title="A tooltip text">
382 <p>
383 This is the next paragraph, just after the picture.
384 </p>
385 </example>
386 <p>
387 You also don't have to care about the size of the image. If the image
388 resolution is largen than the width of the article would currently require
389 on the user's screen, then the image will automatically be downscaled to
390 fit the width of the article. It is recommended though to keep the width
391 of images approximately below 1200px, just to not waste too much repository space
392 (that is disk space) and network bandwidth.
393 </p>
394
395 <h3>Embedded Pictures</h3>
396 <p>
397 Sometimes however it looks nicer to have a picture embedded directly inside a
398 paragraph of text and let that text float around that picture, especially
399 when using rather small images. To achieve that, simply place the image
400 tag inside the paragraph of your HTML file like:
401 </p>
402 <code>
403 <p>
404 <img src="some_picture.png">
405 This is some text of a paragraph. In this particular case, this text will
406 float around the picture. The rest of this text is just repeating,
407 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
408 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
409 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
410 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
411 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
412 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
413 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
414 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
415 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating.
416 </p>
417 </code>
418 <p>
419 Which would look like this:
420 </p>
421 <example style="clear:both;">
422 <p>
423 <img src="a_picture.png">
424 This is some text of a paragraph. In this particular case, this text will
425 float around the picture. The rest of this text is just repeating,
426 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
427 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
428 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
429 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
430 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
431 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
432 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
433 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating,
434 repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating.
435 </p>
436 </example>
437 <p>
438 As you can see, no special knowledge in i.e. HTML or CSS required to achieve
439 such things very easily.
440 </p>
441
442 <h3>Unique Pictures</h3>
443 <p>
444 Once your article and its picture(s) are uploaded to our server, our
445 system will automatically check that all images on our entire site have
446 unique and unambiguous file names, no matter at which directory they
447 are stored to exactly. The "file name" that is checked in this case, is
448 actually the picture's file name without its file type extension
449 (i.e. without ".png", ".jpg", ".gif", etc. at its end). There are two reasons for this:
450 <ol>
451 <li><b>Site Structure Changes:</b>
452 After a while, the structure on a website changes. Certain articles
453 are moved to completely different directories and some article's may
454 reference pictures that were already added and used by other articles before.
455 Which makes sense of course, why saving the exact same picture 10 times
456 under different image files if you can just reference that already existing image file from your new article?
457 Now when those articles and/or the images move to different locations,
458 the image references within such articles might turn to dead references.
459 Our system automatically detects this and corrects the references in
460 articles to any kind of image file automatically, without requiring
461 any user intervention. So we can change the structure of the website
462 at any time without having to update any article file.
463 </li>
464 <li><b>File Type Changes:</b>
465 Sometimes it happens that a picture needs to be replaced with a
466 picture in a different file format. For example the original picture
467 was added in .jpeg format to have a very small file size, but later on
468 some kind of transparency is required for the picture, which is not
469 supported by JPEG. In this case the picture would i.e. be updated
470 and replaced with a .png image file. Our system also detects this and
471 automatically updates all references to that image file in all articles
472 to the precise new name of the image file. Again, no user intervention
473 required.
474 </li>
475 </ol>
476 But for the system to be able to that automatically, it requires all
477 image files to have unique file names, like described above. If you try
478 to upload a new image file to our system which uses a file name that was
479 already taken by another image, then you will automatically be notified by
480 our system via email, asking you to rename one of the image files.
481 </p>
482
483 <h2>Source Code</h2>
484 <p>
485 You might need to post example source code in some of your articles. This
486 is very simple to do. Just wrap your source code into a pair of
487 <code>&lt;code&gt;</code> tags like this:
488 </p>
489 <code>
490 &lt;code&gt;
491
492 ??source-code??
493
494 &lt;/code&gt;
495 </code>
496 <p>
497 Syntax highlighting is automatically generated for you, according to the
498 programming language or markup language used by you. That way you don't
499 have to waste time on how to display source code nicely, and rather
500 concentrate on the content of your article. Like with images, you can
501 decide in which context the source code shall appear in your article,
502 as described next.
503 </p>
504
505 <note>
506 Automatic syntax highlighting is currently available for the
507 <ul>
508 <li><a href="nksp.html">NKSP real-time instrument script language</a></li>
509 <li>HTML markup language</li>
510 </ul>
511 If you need another source code language, just tell
512 <a href="http://www.linuxsampler.org/developers.html#Schoenebeck">Christian</a>
513 and he will add the required module for any kind of language
514 (even the most exotic one) on our server in short time.
515 </note>
516
517 <h3>Stand-Alone Code</h3>
518 <p>
519 If you put your code block outside of paragraphs, that is between
520 paragraph blocks in your HTML file, then the source code will also appear
521 on its own between the paragraph blocks. Here is an example for the
522 <a href="nksp.html">NKSP script language</a>.
523 </p>
524 <code>
525 <p>
526 Paragraph just before the source code block.
527 </p>
528 &lt;code&gt;
529 on init
530 @foo := "A message"
531 message(@foo)
532 end on
533 &lt;/code&gt;
534 <p>
535 Next paragraph just after the source code block.
536 </p>
537 </code>
538 <p>
539 Which would appear like:
540 </p>
541 <example>
542 <p>
543 Paragraph just before the source code block.
544 </p>
545 <code lang="nksp">
546 on init
547 @foo := "A message"
548 message(@foo)
549 end on
550 </code>
551 <p>
552 Next paragraph just after the source code block.
553 </p>
554 </example>
555 <p>
556 The source code automatically appears nicely in color and with line
557 numbers between the two paragraphs. This site's software will also take
558 care about removing white lines at the front and end of your source code
559 blocks appropriately.
560 </p>
561
562 <h3>Embedded Code</h3>
563 <p>
564 In case you are mentioning a very small part of the source code in your
565 text, then you probably might want that to be displayed actually as source code
566 directly embedded into your paragraph. You might already guess how to
567 do that: simply put the code block into the paragraph text block of your
568 HTML file:
569 </p>
570 <code>
571 <p>
572 A variable is assigned with NKSP like this &lt;code&gt;$foo := 5&lt;/code&gt;, in this
573 case you are assigning &lt;code&gt;5&lt;/code&gt; to the integer variable &lt;code&gt;$foo&lt;/code&gt;.
574 </p>
575 </code>
576 <p>
577 And this would be the result:
578 </p>
579 <example>
580 <p>
581 A variable is assigned with NKSP like this <code lang="nksp">$foo := 5</code>, in this
582 case you are assigning <code lang="nksp">5</code> to the integer variable <code lang="nksp">$foo</code>.
583 </p>
584 </example>
585 <p>
586 That looks now much more easier to read, doesn't it?
587 </p>
588
589 <note>
590 Syntax highlighting of source code is automatically generated by our site's software
591 once the document is uploaded to our server. So when you are just
592 previewing your article with source code snippets on your local machine,
593 then those source code snippets will yet be displayed monochrome,
594 without any syntax highlighting.
595 </note>
596
597 <h3>Metaphors</h3>
598 <p>
599 You might have noticed, we have used a special kind of <code>??place-holder??</code> for
600 human-readable portions in source code before, which shall outline to the reader
601 that it is not actually "real" source code, but just reflecting its semantic meaning.
602 Simply put the respective pseudo-code into a pair of two question marks,
603 like so:
604 </p>
605 <code>
606 &lt;code&gt;
607 on init
608 declare const $i = \?\?some-value\?\?
609
610 message(\?\?text-string\?\?)
611 end on
612 &lt;/code&gt;
613 </code>
614 <p>
615 Which will look like this:
616 </p>
617 <example>
618 <code lang="nksp">
619 on init
620 declare const $i = ??some-value??
621
622 message(??text-string??)
623 end on
624 </code>
625 </example>
626 <p>
627 These <i>metaphors</i> are especially useful in beginners tutorials for
628 clearly separating real source code portions from pseudo-code portions,
629 and to point the reader's eyes to the most important locations of your
630 source code snippet.
631 </p>
632
633 <h2>Links and Article File Names</h2>
634 <p>
635 If you want to add links in your article to another article or to some
636 other website, then you just use an ordinary HTML link tag pair:
637 </p>
638 <code>
639 <p>
640 This paragraph contains &lt;a href="../nksp.html"&gt;a link to another article&lt;/a&gt;
641 and to &lt;a href="http://www.linuxsampler.org"&gt;another website&lt;/a&gt;.
642 </p>
643 </code>
644 <example>
645 <p>
646 This paragraph contains <a href="../nksp.html">a link to another article</a>
647 and to <a href="http://www.linuxsampler.org">another website</a>.
648 </p>
649 </example>
650 <p>
651 Concerning links to other websites, there is nothing special for you to know about.
652 </p>
653 <p>
654 Regarding local links to another article however: these are monitored
655 similar like references to image files (as <a href="#unique_pictures">described before</a>), that is
656 our system automatically detects if the path of some of your local links to
657 another article is incorrect, i.e. because the website structure changed
658 in the meantime, and it will automatically correct the path to the correct
659 location of the article for you, without requiring any user intervention.
660 For this reason, all articles must have unique file names for the entire
661 site, no matter in which directory the respective article's HTML file is
662 located at exactly.
663 </p>
664 <p>
665 An article file on our site usually has the following
666 file name form:
667 </p>
668 <code>
669 ??number-prefix??_??unique-name??.html
670 </code>
671 <p>
672 The <code>??number-prefix??</code> is optional. It allows us to control
673 the order of articles on the same website structure level (i.e.
674 concerning its location in the navigation bar).
675 The <code>??unique-name??</code> portion of the file name though is actually the
676 relevant part our site's software is looking at. This "root" of its file
677 name must be globally unique among our entire site. If you add a new
678 article to our site with a file name that is already taken by another
679 article, then our system will automatically inform you via email to
680 resolve this issue by renaming one of them. Also note that the file name
681 just acts as internal ID while writing articles. The original file name
682 of the input HTML file will not be directly exposed to readers on our
683 documentation site.
684 </p>
685
686 <h2>Terms</h2>
687 <p>
688 Technical terms and abbreviations are often used in articles to reduce
689 the amount of text for transmitting some kind of information about a
690 certain topic to the reader. You might want to emphasize technical terms and abbreviations
691 in your article, by wrapping the term into a pair of <code><i></code> HTML
692 tags. On our site this will not only show the term in a special unified
693 font style (currently italic), but it allows you also to define the
694 meaning of the term <b>once</b>. Which goes like this:
695 </p>
696
697 <h3>Defining a Term</h3>
698 <p>
699 You may define a new term like this:
700 </p>
701 <code>
702 <p>
703 He left the bar and jumped right into his
704 &lt;i title="A very large vehicle."&gt;Mega Liner&lt;/i&gt;
705 to follow the street right into sunset.
706 </p>
707 </code>
708 <example>
709 <p>
710 He left the bar and jumped right into his
711 <i title="A very large truck vehicle.">Mega Liner</i>
712 to follow the street right into sunset.
713 </p>
714 </example>
715 <p>
716 Now when you point your mouse over the term, a popup will appear,
717 describing the meaning of the term.
718 </p>
719
720 <h3>Referencing an already defined Term</h3>
721 <p>
722 Obviously you don't want to define
723 the same term over and over again, just to provide the user the meaning of
724 it at any occurence of the site. That's why our software does that
725 automatically for you once your article is uploaded to our server. Now
726 when you use the term at another place, i.e. in another article, then
727 it will automatically have the same meaning attached to it:
728 </p>
729 <code>
730 <p>
731 Once again he was sitting behind the wheel of his &lt;i&gt;Mega Liner&lt;/i&gt;,
732 but things were different back then.
733 </p>
734 </code>
735 <example>
736 <p>
737 Once again he was sitting behind the wheel of his <i>Mega Liner</i>, but
738 things were different back then.
739 </p>
740 </example>
741 <p>
742 Point your mouse again over the term, and you will notice that the same
743 term definition will popup as tooltip, like at its original location where
744 it was defined before.
745 <p>
746 </p>
747 Due to this fact, our site's software does not even allow you to define the
748 same term more than once (at least not with a different meaning that is).
749 It will scan all documents in our current pool and if somebody tries to
750 re-declare an already existing term again with a different meaning, he
751 will automatically be notified by our system via email and kindly asked
752 to resolve the ambiguousness.
753 </p>
754 <note>
755 Our system automatically handles redundant variants of terms. That means
756 first of all, that all term names are stored, compared and looked up case insensitive,
757 and the system automatically tries to auto complete i.e. plural forms
758 of the same term.
759 </note>
760
761 <h2>Tables</h2>
762 <p>
763 Tables are written like ordinary HTML tables. That is:
764 </p>
765 <code>
766 <table>
767 <tr>
768 <th>Name</th> <th>Description</th>
769 </tr>
770 <tr>
771 <td>Foo</td> <td>Some text.</td>
772 </tr>
773 <tr>
774 <td>Bar</td> <td>And more text.</td>
775 </tr>
776 <tr>
777 <td>Thing</td> <td>And that's it.</td>
778 </tr>
779 </table>
780 </code>
781 <example>
782 <table>
783 <tr>
784 <th>Name</th> <th>Description</th>
785 </tr>
786 <tr>
787 <td>Foo</td> <td>Some text.</td>
788 </tr>
789 <tr>
790 <td>Bar</td> <td>And more text.</td>
791 </tr>
792 <tr>
793 <td>Thing</td> <td>And that's it.</td>
794 </tr>
795 </table>
796 </example>
797 <p>
798 So <code>&lt;tr&gt;</code> wraps up individual rows of a table,
799 <code>&lt;th&gt;</code> contains the individual cells of the table header,
800 and <code>&lt;td&gt;</code> contains the individual cells of the table's
801 body.
802 </p>
803
804 <h2>Note Boxes</h2>
805 <p>
806 Once in a while you need to inform the reader about noteworthy issues.
807 For this purpose we are using a special <code>&lt;note&gt;</code> tag.
808 </p>
809 <h3>Regular Notes</h3>
810 <p>
811 To add regular notes to your article with low or normal importance, add
812 the note like this:
813 </p>
814 <code>
815 &lt;note&gt;
816 This is an issue you need to know about. Please read this carefully to avoid
817 making any mistakes.
818 &lt;/note&gt;
819 </code>
820 <example>
821 <note>
822 This is an issue you need to know about. Please read this carefully to avoid
823 making any mistakes.
824 </note>
825 </example>
826 <p>
827 This is not a regular HTML tag defined in the HTML standard, but with
828 modern browsers supporting CSS3, it should display just as intended.
829 </p>
830
831 <h3>Important Notes</h3>
832 <p>
833 If you need to inform the reader about a very important issue instead,
834 then you might use the following slightly different form:
835 </p>
836 <code>
837 &lt;note class="important"&gt;
838 Now this is a very important issue you need to be aware of. If you ignore it,
839 your task will fail.
840 &lt;/note&gt;
841 </code>
842 <example>
843 <note class="important">
844 Now this is a very important issue you need to be aware of. If you ignore it,
845 your task will fail.
846 </note>
847 </example>
848 <p>
849 The only thing that changed compared to the regular note, is the "class"
850 attribute of the note tag.
851 </p>
852
853 <h2>Extensions</h2>
854 <p>
855 This is almost the end of this article. You are still seeking for features
856 for one of your articles, that are not already covered by our system?
857 Then either ask <a href="http://www.linuxsampler.org/developers.html#Schoenebeck">Christian</a>
858 whether that feature could be added, or ... extend your article on your
859 own. It's real HTML after all! So you can add your own HTML, CSS and
860 Java Script to your articles at any time!
861 </p>
862
863 <h2>What next?</h2>
864 <p>
865 You are at the end of our tour introducing our documentation system.
866 You may now start writing your first article. Once you are done with it,
867 simply
868 <a href="http://www.linuxsampler.org/developers.html">
869 send your article to some of us
870 </a>, or request an account to our Subversion repository, so you can
871 manage articles of our documentation site on your own.
872 </p>
873 <p>
874 Thanks for your support!
875 </p>
876
877 </body>
878 </html>

  ViewVC Help
Powered by ViewVC