Hitchhiker's Guide To AGS

[Dualnames]

This might not really be the perfect place to post but well.
Well, it's been a while that I've been thinking about this, and it's not my obsession with blogs.We all know that newbies tend to ask the same thing over, and over , and over again. That's why I decided to write posts on a blog, that can be found easily via label cloud. So I'm taking all problems(common and not so common) that were solved in the beginners and technical forums and making a huge blog about it.

I'm sort of trying to create a warm comfy place full of useful information.

If anyone cares to join it, let me know, the more the merrier.

If anyone cares to read it here's the link:

http://guidetoags.blogspot.com/

The name of the blog has really nothing to do but the similarity to HHGTG.

[Nickydude]

This is great! We now have an online 'guide' and a downloadable one. Looking good Dualnames.

[RickJ]

Jim, I thought and you and Nicky may be interested in checking out dockbook  as a means of producing your AGS guides.  Docbook is a standard set of XML tags used to markup a document's source file.  The source is run through an XSLT processor along with style sheets to produce a formatted output document.   This would allow you guys to collaborate  on the content and then publish that content to different formats such as HTML, PSF, CHM, and others, by simply running the the XSLT processor with the same source and different style sheets. 

There is a simple command line system that installs on and runs in windows called eDe (e-novative DocBook environment, enovative is the name of the company) and is the one I currently use.  You can download it from here and it's free and open source.
http://www.e-novative.info/software/ede.php

I use notepad++ to edit the source files.  There is an XML (or Docbook) plugin  that allows you to check for errors in the source.  It is also free and open source and can be downloaded from here.
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

The main problem I've had is that the error checking isn't very good at identifying the line where the error is located.  It's a situation similar to the omission of a closing quote " mark in AGS.  The easiest thing to do is to check for errors often.

The eDe package comes with default style sheets that make it easy to make CHM, PDF, and two different versions of HTML.  I am not particularly fond of how it's setup for customized style sheets and document formats but it gets one of to a fast start.  I have thought to make my own system  based on this but with a different document creation/customization scheme.  Anyway don't be put off by the defaults; they can be changed.

Anyway, take a look and if you are interested I would be glad to help you get started.

[Dualnames]

Sounds like a plan, but I'm keeping the version of the guide in an online form. However, once most it's content is settled I'll definetely look up into your suggestion. Thanks a lot.