You are viewing a plain text version of this content. The canonical link for it is here.
Posted to dev@subversion.apache.org by Julian Foad <ju...@btopenworld.com> on 2004/10/20 23:12:22 UTC
Book: can we incorporate O'Reilly's edits?
I have started to notice some differences between our copy of the book
source and what O'Reilly published. For instance, they added a section
"Comments and Questions", they listed Appendix E in the table of
contents (where we forgot to), they edited the content and formatting of
Appendix E, etc.
Is there any chance of us getting those modifications from O'Reilly in a
batch? If not, we will just have to choose whether to make the same
edits to our source if and when we notice them, which is not the end of
the world but a bit of a shame.
(I acknowledge that O'Reilly made some changes and additions, especially
to the very beginning and end of the book, and to the formatting, that
are not appropriate for the electronic version; I'm only talking about
changes that are appropriate.)
- Julian
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Re: Book: can we incorporate O'Reilly's edits?
Posted by Chris Pepper <pe...@reppep.com>.
At 9:30 AM -0500 10/21/04, C. Michael Pilato wrote:
>Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net> writes:
>
>> It's also not uncommon, at least judging from my experiences in this
>> area, and those of everyone else I've talked to... It seems that
>> after you hit a certain point in the publishing process last minute
>> changes are made in the framemaker (or whatever equivalent tool the
>> publisher is using) version of the book directly, rather than making
>> the change in the original (in this case docbook) version and
>> reimporting into frame.
>
>That's exactly the case here (and for the same reasons you described
>in your mail). At this point, they are simply unable to provide us
>anything even resembling a patchfile. :-(
Well, can they export the printed edition from FrameMaker as
XML (or something ASCII-based), and then re-import the original XML
to FrameMaker and export that for comparison?
Presumably a diff of the virgin vs. tweaked versions would at
least provide a list of things to review, and hopefully most of those
are already reflected in later revisions of the repository...
Chris Pepper
--
Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/>
Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Re: Book: can we incorporate O'Reilly's edits?
Posted by Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@collab.net>.
On Oct 21, 2004, at 11:52 AM, Julian Foad wrote:
> C. Michael Pilato wrote:
>> Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net> writes:
>>> after you hit a certain point in the publishing process last minute
>>> changes are made in the framemaker (or whatever equivalent tool the
> [...]
>> At this point, they are simply unable to provide us
>> anything even resembling a patchfile. :-(
>
> Yes, I understand how it happens. I just hope they keep a note of
> what they have changed, as they are going to want to do the same thing
> next time.
>
> Even a hand-written list of the approximate types of change would be
> useful. That must be more like what Ben meant they are now able to
> provide.
>
> But, if we can't reasonably easily get anything useful from them,
> then, oh well, we'll live.
>
There's a small disconnect here in the publishing process. Most
publishers, once they typeset something using proprietary tools,
consider themselves to have the "main" book source. They collect
errata and publish new versions based on their FrameMaker files. This
model works pretty well, in general, for most books. But not with open
source books, which are evolving constantly.
But now we have a case where both parties -- publisher and authors --
each consider themselves to have the "main" book source. The authors
consider the docbook XML to be the real thing, the FrameMaker stuff
merely a derived product. The publishers consider the docbook XML to
be nonexistent, and their binary files to be the real thing. Each
party wants the other to 'send diffs', thinking the *other* party's
changes are the errata. :-)
Of course, I'm making things sound antagonistic, when they really
aren't. The problem is that in this case, the authors have nice tools
for sending and receiving patches, and the publishers don't, being
locked into FrameMaker, and being ordinary editors, not techie people.
So it's an awkward impasse. It's really, really hard to trade changes
back and forth, so it's not being done. We tried to visually spot all
the changes they made in FrameMaker, but it was an imperfect process.
:-(
When it comes time for O'Reilly to publish a 1.1 or 1.2 version of the
book, I fear that they'll be in for an unpleasant surprise. The book
is constantly changing, and their FrameMaker code is not. I think that
means they're just going to have to take a fresh delivery of XML and
re-import into FrameMaker, re-format everything.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Re: Book: can we incorporate O'Reilly's edits?
Posted by Julian Foad <ju...@btopenworld.com>.
C. Michael Pilato wrote:
> Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net> writes:
>>after you hit a certain point in the publishing process last minute
>>changes are made in the framemaker (or whatever equivalent tool the
[...]
> At this point, they are simply unable to provide us
> anything even resembling a patchfile. :-(
Yes, I understand how it happens. I just hope they keep a note of what
they have changed, as they are going to want to do the same thing next time.
Even a hand-written list of the approximate types of change would be
useful. That must be more like what Ben meant they are now able to provide.
But, if we can't reasonably easily get anything useful from them, then,
oh well, we'll live.
- Julian
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Re: Book: can we incorporate O'Reilly's edits?
Posted by "C. Michael Pilato" <cm...@collab.net>.
Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net> writes:
> It's also not uncommon, at least judging from my experiences in this
> area, and those of everyone else I've talked to... It seems that
> after you hit a certain point in the publishing process last minute
> changes are made in the framemaker (or whatever equivalent tool the
> publisher is using) version of the book directly, rather than making
> the change in the original (in this case docbook) version and
> reimporting into frame.
That's exactly the case here (and for the same reasons you described
in your mail). At this point, they are simply unable to provide us
anything even resembling a patchfile. :-(
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Re: Book: can we incorporate O'Reilly's edits?
Posted by Garrett Rooney <ro...@electricjellyfish.net>.
Julian Foad wrote:
> Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
>
>> O'Reilly made a bunch of edits without telling us, and we had to
>> manually discover them and recreate them in the source. It was ugly.
>> :-(
>
>
> That's painfully ironic, given the systems and techniques that the book
> describes. :-)
It's also not uncommon, at least judging from my experiences in this
area, and those of everyone else I've talked to... It seems that after
you hit a certain point in the publishing process last minute changes
are made in the framemaker (or whatever equivalent tool the publisher is
using) version of the book directly, rather than making the change in
the original (in this case docbook) version and reimporting into frame.
It seems like the major motivating factors for this are that there are
always a LOT of manual tweaks that are done in frame to make things look
right, which would be hard to redo, and the fact that the non-technical
people tend to not know how to use the docbook toolchain, so even if
they did know how to edit the raw XML (and they don't) they wouldn't be
able to regenerate a final copy from it, so they can't tell if their
changes work or not.
It's a very different process from what you'd expect, at least coming
from the software development world where such a thing would be taboo.
-garrett
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Re: Book: can we incorporate O'Reilly's edits?
Posted by Julian Foad <ju...@btopenworld.com>.
Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> O'Reilly made a bunch of edits without telling us, and we had to
> manually discover them and recreate them in the source. It was ugly. :-(
That's painfully ironic, given the systems and techniques that the book
describes. :-)
> After the fact, it looks like they're able to give us some kind of
> 'batch' description of the changes, but only if we push them a bit.
> There's been a bit of discussion about it, but we never pushed for it
> very hard.
I feel that doing so would be only fair to us, after we have gone to
great lengths to prepare the book in a manner acceptable to them. Doing
so would save them work if they ever publish a second edition.
I accept that O'Reilly might not want to give us things like the index,
as that is a significant piece of their own private work that can help
to give their printed version value over others. But I would really
appreciate getting back their multiple minor edits for things like
language style and mark-up.
> In the meantime, feel free to manually port stuff from hardcopy to
> source, if you notice things...
Thanks. I may port some of the simple differences that I notice.
However, they have made, for example, an editorial decision to remove
the use of "<emphasis>" in several places where it was apparently
unnecessarily strong, and it would be laborious to go through the whole
book searching for those.
The thing is, I respect their judgement in such matters. I don't think
it's a matter of them changing it to suit themselves, and us wanting to
keep it the way we have it and like it.
Would you be willing to give them another little push? Quote me if you
like.
- Julian
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org
Re: Book: can we incorporate O'Reilly's edits?
Posted by Ben Collins-Sussman <su...@collab.net>.
On Oct 20, 2004, at 6:12 PM, Julian Foad wrote:
> I have started to notice some differences between our copy of the book
> source and what O'Reilly published. For instance, they added a
> section "Comments and Questions", they listed Appendix E in the table
> of contents (where we forgot to), they edited the content and
> formatting of Appendix E, etc.
>
> Is there any chance of us getting those modifications from O'Reilly in
> a batch? If not, we will just have to choose whether to make the same
> edits to our source if and when we notice them, which is not the end
> of the world but a bit of a shame.
O'Reilly made a bunch of edits without telling us, and we had to
manually discover them and recreate them in the source. It was ugly.
:-(
After the fact, it looks like they're able to give us some kind of
'batch' description of the changes, but only if we push them a bit.
There's been a bit of discussion about it, but we never pushed for it
very hard.
In the meantime, feel free to manually port stuff from hardcopy to
source, if you notice things...
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org