We are a small business that specializes in linux including converting people from Windows. We provide a printed manual to anybody that wants it free of charge that covers how to use Gnome 3. This was done by painstakingly going thru the help and doing days of copy and paste. Then we organize it and create a printed manual including table of contents and index. With the release of the new Gnome we clearly need to do a new manual. I am trying to avoid the time going thru the help which often results in missing parts that take much time to realize and fix. What I am hoping is that somebody can point me to or provide a copy of the new help documents with pictures in it that I can just copy to Libre Office and create the manual more reliably and easily.
Hi, you’re looking for gnome-user-docs. This is what displays when you open yelp with no arguments, or you could run yelp gnome-user-docs/gnome-help/C/index.page to see what it looks like after cloning the git repo. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0
Unported License.
Clearly I did not explain myself well enough. I am trying to find everything in one single document. I am trying to avoid having to do 3 days of copy and paste while trying to keep track of what was and was not copied causing duplication and missing areas. What you pointed me to is the same documents that I already have when I hit help. I am looking for an easy efficient and accurate way to get the help pages. I have already been thru the link you provided and it is not useful. It requires far too much cut paste and search which introduces many errors I may not catch. I wanted to upload a copy of the old manual so you could see what I need. However I am not allowed to do that. I am producing a printed version of the help in a manual that people used to actual paper books can use.
perhaps this criteria would help.
1… anything that has to be downloaded, compiled, or is split among multiple screens or pages is not usefull.
2… Anything that does not have some illustrations for the user is not usefull.
3… Anything that can’t be copy and pasted in a single shot is not usefull.
You can use yelp-build to create an EPUB file as follows:
yelp-build epub -o /tmp/gnome-user.epub ~/Projects/gnome-user-docs/gnome-help/C
and convert that, e.g. to an ODT file, as follows:
pandoc -s --from=epub --to=odt -o gnome-user.odt gnome-user.epub
I’m sure there are many possible conversion tools. I expect the link targets would need to be fixed but at least you have all the text.
However, the style of documentation created using Mallard (such as this manual) is topic-based and may be structured on the expectation that the reader can jump around via hyperlinks quickly. For a paper document, the content could be poorly structured with too much cross-referencing. I would suggest pointing them to the HTML version and I expect readers would soon start using that instead. You can build this yourself as follows:
yelp-build html -o output_dir ~/Projects/gnome-user-docs/gnome-help/C
That worked for me. I had to download the help docs and modify the commands you gave along with fixing some missing graphics but it did the trick perfectly otherwise. I am now editing the document and creating references etc. My only concern is hoping my stapler will make it through the pages after printing. Old manual was 65 pages this one is about 200.
Thank you for the detailed direction
I just tried, as a single document version would be really nice.
I did
git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-user-docs.git
$ yelp-build epub -o /tmp/kkk/gnome.epub ~/gnome-user-docs/gnome-help/C
Error: No source found for figures/classic-topbar-network-wired.svg
It works when we supply a dummy file for classic-topbar-network-wired.svg
Unfortunately I have not pandoc installed yet, so could not try to continue. But I asked google about a single document version and it pointed me to
which is really nice.
This SVG file is used in the case of GNOME Classic and it looks like it is missing. I don’t see the error as my desktop is standard GNOME. I think it would be worth raising an issue for that.
This should be easily made available via a package manager, e.g.
sudo dnf install pandoc
As long as other resources like this are kept up to date with GNOME versions in a timely manner, they are nice!
I think my is standard GNOME too. Since a few weeks it is Gnome40 now, provided by Gentoo Linux. Note that he wrote “some missing graphics but it did the trick perfectly otherwise.” So may be the same file missing for him. So I will create an issue.
This should be easily made available via a package manager, e.g.
Pandoc is masked by default for Gentoo, and unmasking it requires then unmasking and installing many more packages, some Haskell related. Was too much trouble for me now.
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