FlightGear's DocumentationWhile it is nice to see FlightGear's documentation growing more and more (even though slowly), it's obvious that some of the docs are incomplete or simply outdated, also the documentation itself is still pretty terse in many areas. Hence, the FlightGear mailing lists or their archives are usually much more informative or current than the shipped docs themselves. When I recently browsed the mailing list archives, it became obvious that there are numerous threads that contain information that should really be a part of the official documentation.So, I was thinking of using the mailing list to update the docs.Unfortunately, the discussions and responses on the mailing list are usually not suitable to be easily copied/pasted into new doc files for FlightGear without having someone actually read and rephrase each thread into a new text, because of their discussion character (what a volunteer task).So, I think it might be a good idea to officially suggest users/developers on both mailing lists to try to respond to issues of common interest in a maximally general and more formal manner, so that any valuable responses to issues that are possibly of general interest, do not necessarily have some sort of "chat" character, but are much more like a text from a manual.That way, such responses could be easily copied/pasted into new or existing docs and FlightGear's documentation could certainly be updated and extended much easier, so that it grows at a much more rapid pace.Actually, this should be a fairly simple thing to do, it's mainly a "state of mind" matter, so that people take into account that when they're actually posting a possibly helpful response, that this response shouldn't be too personal or colloquial but rather contain only general information in a neutral fashion.Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting to stop discussing on the mailing lists, I'm only suggesting to provide helpful responses (within the same thread or posting) in a fashion that allows your responses to be copied/pasted into the docs.So, discussions would of course still take place, but any usable responses would be provided in a different format within each posting, so that someone with CVS priviledges can easily copy/paste your response and put it into the base package's Doc folder.So, whenever there's any inquiry that might be of general interest, and that might be worth to be included with the FlightGear docs, it would certainly be a good idea to try to keep responses maximally general when replying, so that they can afterwards be simply copied to the Docs directory of the CVS.Apart from that, when browsing the mailing list archives, it's noticable that a number of users still needs to be pointed to the documentation under $FG_ROOT/Docs that's contained in the various README* ascii files with their corresponding extensions.I guess that this can be mainly attributed to some operating system trying to do type recognition of files by their filename's extension (i.e. Win32), so even though the files themselves may show up properly, the OS doesn't "know" how to actually open these files because of their arbitrary extensions (README.gui, README.layout etc.).My suggestion for this problem would be to additionally provide a simple LaTex wrapper for these plaintext files, that way all files can still be kept in plaintext format, but they can be easily converted to any format (i.e. PDF) automatically.I've attached a corresponding example for such a wrapper:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/120060.txt

Are you volunteering? :-hah

By the way, there are already LaTex wrappers. They are under the $FG_ROOT/docs/getstart/source directory.

What do you mean by "volunteering" ?I was actually simply suggesting to try to keep responses maximally general, so that they can be easily re-used, indeed that's exactly what I'm tryingwhen I'm posting here, so there's not much to do concerning "volunteering",as I said already: it's mainly a "state of mind" issue.Concerning the wrapper: Well, no - there seems to be a misconception:>By the way, there are already LaTex wrappers. They are under>the $FG_ROOT/docs/getstart/source directory.If you're referring to the (recently updated) Tex sources under docs/getstart/source (that is, http://cvs.flightgear.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/...=FlightGear-0.9 )then you are referring to a completely different set of files (that is, the FlightGear Tutorial).(Also, these files are exclusively native Tex files, so they aren't really "wrappers" either).However, I was merely suggesting to provide a LaTex (convenience) wrapper around the plaintext ascii files that can be found under $FG_ROOT/Docs (that is, all README*.* files), as these are the files that seem to be often missed by new users, which can probably be attributed to the non-standard filename extensions of those files, so that Win32 OS cannot automatically recognize the type of a file in order to come up with a viewer.If you look at these $FG_ROOT/Docs/README* files you'll notice that they contain completely different contents from the tutorial sources that you mentioned above.I've attached an example (PDF) based on said wrapper.

What about a FlightGear wiki? Wouldn't that be a nice and fairly easily updatable solution?Ken

>What about a FlightGear wiki? Wouldn't that be a nice and>fairly easily updatable solution?Well, there is already a FlightGear related Wiki, however it's located at a separate webpage, hosted with a free wiki provider, but it's hardly known by most people, even among the developers only few people seem to be aware of that wiki.Apart from that, it's simply not yet really officially used or supported, practically all FlightGear related data (files/webpages) is currently maintained via CVS, so they aren't even using any sort of CMS for the webpage.While I'm convinced that many users would actually love to see a FlightGear specific Wiki AT FlightGear.org, I doubt that it will be installed anytime soon, I think the idea to host the wiki at FlightGear.org directly was mentioned numerous times on the devel list, but so far to no avail.Also, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to host a FlightGear specific forum itself at FlightGear.org, I'd guess.