Ardour documentation project

Work is going on

The project took off and is in progress now. On the navigation on the left is an item called "Ardour Reference Manual", this is the "book definition" document which glues all together. Each section and subsection is written in its own document (speaking in terms of Daisy) and these documents are linked in this book definition document. Edit the book definition to add new sections as you write them! They will auto-magically appear in the navigation.

The Outline as we planned it can also be found on the navigation tree; it is called "Ardour Manual Outline". Please read and consider it when participating.

Basic Information

Welcome to the Ardour Documentation Project.  The point of this is to rewrite the manual for Ardour, in the process updating and expanding it.  The reason for this is the current manual is extremely out of date and of limited usefulness.

This project is being handled currently by the Daisy CMS Wiki system.  We chose Daisy for the short term due to its capability of publishing to both HTML and PDF formats, and in particular the quality of its PDF publishing.  This is a short term solution most likely, but the primary goal is to get a useful manual out as fast as we can.

The way that the Daisy CMS works, is that you create independent articles, and we link them to the book definition.  We can also import articles into other articles, which is the goal for most of our work.  All subsections will be separate articles/documents which will be gathered into sections by importing them. To see what I am talking about, take a look at the MIDI section that has been filled in slightly.  Notice how each article is broken into very specific topics.  It seems very broken up while you are working, but when it renders it flows very smoothly.  Here is a PDF (application/pdf, 169.1 kB, info) to reference on how everything comes together when we render it.

You can find some documentation for Daisy here.  This will contain much more information than we really need for our purposes, but there is some good stuff in there, and it is published using Daisy so you can get an idea of what the PDF publishing is capable of.

There is also a short introductory video which is well worth watching if you can, possibly even much more worth it than the manual linked to above.

So we have been working to transfer over some of the newly created structure, as a result we have a lot of empty articles on the left hand side.  Go ahead and grab one and start creating content.  Content from the old manual can be copied over if it is still relevant, if you do so though put a FIXME section at the top of the page saying this for the moment until we get the chance to read everything over.

Also, while we believe this to be fairly stable, it is installed and run by spare processing power by someone in their spare time.  As a result, anything you type up, make sure you keep a local copy as well as the copy on the server.  This will have to serve as our backup until we get a regular backup policy started.  At the moment our admin is a bit busy, so this might take a while, so make sure you keep copies.

Discussions and agreements, notes.

Discussions on irc #ardour are quick, but volatile. Newcombers, people without continuous net access or just living in a different time zone might miss many interesting discussions, agreements or questions and answers. It might be a good idea to use a discussion page to make these things more persistent and visible to everybody working on this project.