General Information
Authors Mailing List
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authors mailing list. This mailing list is used for announcements and discussion.
Traffic is intermittent and our monthly updates are sent to this list. If members request
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Some General Remarks
We chose to use LaTeX as our typesetting language. It is not easy to collaborate on
a book as it is distinctly different from a coding project where code fragments
can look completely different. In the book the style must be consistent. This doesn't
justify LaTeX but we can define our own environments which will allow us to make
book-wide changes by changing a single definition. Granted this can be done with any
markup language but we all knew LaTeX and our priority is to write the books not build
a book-writing framework.
We realise that not all our authors will be familiar with LaTeX and we'd like them
to appreciate that it would be hard to agree on standards and no matter what format
was used. If an author is completely adverse to LaTeX we will gladly convert a contribution
from some other format.
We also use a CVS server and the reasons are listed on the
CVS
Setup page. It does give us quite a lot of flexibility and a nice simple backup.
If an author is not familiar with CVS its not very difficult to set up as we explain
on the
CVS Setup page. If you aren't familiar with CVS see
this as an opportunity to learn a new skill.
Strategy
Currently we are trying to collect as much content as possible. Although we
would like to produce books conforming to the South African syllabus it would
be very nice to have sufficient content to cover most countries' syllabus.
At the end of 2004 we hope to have the content completely finished. In 2005 we
will focus on getting feedback from schools in South Africa to produce books specific
to the syllabus and other requirements. At this stage we can branch the repository so
as to allow general content accumulation. We will also post all our content on
wikibooks.
Resources - Are We Alone?
No. We can use any content from
wikipedia and
wikibooks. They use the same license we do so its
not a problem to cut and paste their content. Its also a nice place to start looking
for ideas if you are starting a new section. We will give all our content back to the
community when we are finished.
For physics we can also use content from
Light and Matter
but this requires that we ask the author to release it appropriately. We have contacted
Ben and it will be possible. If you want to use any of his content let us know and we'll
arrange it.
