User Manuals

Overview

At this point in time, there are no comprehensive User Guides for OpenPetra users available.

Current Options

• A Basic Tutorial on OpenPetra is available. This is a guide to some of the basic functionality that is available in OpenPetra.
• A first start has been made at https://docs.openpetra.org/ and https://handbuch.openpetra.de/

See Application Help for another form of documentation for OpenPetra.

Goals of OpenPetra User Guides

Content

• Should provide thorough instructions and answers on how to use OpenPetra effectively.

Format

• A separate User Guide for each of the OpenPetra Modules should be created.
• A 'General User Guide' for a general introduction to OpenPetra should be created.

Portable

• User Guides should be viewable on any operating system. This goal could be reached by providing the User Guides in PDF format.

Authoring of User Guides

In this wiki

The plan is to write the content of the User Guides here in the wiki, and to then create PDF files from it (see 'Creation of User Guides' below).

Start page for the actual content of the User Guides

TODO: instructions about how to organise chapters, topics, screenshots etc.

Creation of User Guides

The content of the wiki pages from page Start page for the actual content of the User Guides onwards will first need to be exported in an automated way and end up in an intermediate format (quite possibly DocBook). From that intermediate format nicely layed out PDF files will need to be created. This will make it possible to view the User Guides on any operating system.

The 'nice layout' could be reached

• manually
  • by editing the DocBook intermediate format manually, e.g. using an WYSIWG editor for DocBook files such as [Syntex Serna Free], or OpenOffice. For OpenOffice, import filters for the DocBook format exist, and also conversion utilities that convert the DocBook format into OpenOffice's native OpenDocument format.
• automatically
  • by using tools which apply XSL transformations to create a nice layout and which result in PDF files (similar to the process which FLOSS Manuals uses).

TODO: Details

Possible Alternative: FLOSS Manuals

See FLOSS Manuals