Sell the Twisted reference PDF, bound as a physical book

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

• Remove obvious garbage from the pdf
• Find an on-demand publishing site
• Do it
• Fold appropriate improvements from the published pdf back into the regular pdf

[Glyph]

Made the subject clearer so that people don't think this ticket is related to O'Reilly's Twisted book.

[itamarst]

We also need to add list of authors and license.

We will use lulu.com for the first run.

[itamarst]

We're going to use regular PDF.

License by itself should be sufficient, since it lists Twisted Matrix Labs.

Saph has made some cover images.

[itamarst]

JP, could you take a look at the branch?

Also, I'm considering dropping the finger tutorial so this is more of a reference (and a lot shorter, thus cheaper to print). Any thoughts?

[itamarst]

Changes are in /branches/pdf-bound-documentation-1830-3 - I removed some bogus howtos, re-organized the PDF, added license, and made output look better.

[Jonathan Lange]

Syntactically the code changes look fine.

admin/process-docs fails for me, but I think that's because I am missing some dependencies. A bug should be filed to catch this.

It would be good to have a parameter for paper size, but I don't think that should block this branch.

The content and layout of the book still need to be reviewed.

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

Some things I notice in book.pdf (some of these are changes in the branch, some are problems in trunk):

• There is now a blank page between the title page and the table of contents page. There was not one before.
• The table of contents used to be page 1, now it is page 3
• Page numbers are now book-style (although evens are on the left and odds are on the right, which seems wrong if the title page is page 1, but maybe that's what the blank page is for? still, I think evens should be on the right.)
• More space between table of contents lines
• Even though we removed content, I see that the book is longer now - 233 pages in current trunk@HEAD, 241 in the branch.
• I think we can probably afford to leave out the dirdbm content (if this is contentious, disregard).
• TwistedQuotes still uses the old plugin system :(
• Section 1.1 misspells "concepts" as "conepts" - this is from async.xhtml. Should we spellcheck the whole thing, maybe? :)
• Section 6.4, Using telnet to manipulate a twisted server, uses the deprecated telnet support.
• The LICENSE file says copyright 2001-2006

I think I'll stop there. I don't think we need to make everything across all of our documentation perfect in order to bind and sell it (would that we had the resources to do so). I do think it would be beneficial to have a preface written specifically for the printed version, though.

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

FWIW, for anyone who can't actually generate the pdf, versions based on trunk and the branch can be found (at least for a while) here:

​http://twistedmatrix.com/~exarkun/book-aug-18-2007-trunk.pdf ​http://twistedmatrix.com/~exarkun/book-aug-18-2007-branch.pdf

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

(In [27416]) Branching to 'pdf-bound-documentation-1830-4'

[Adi Roiban]

No plan to sell the book for now :)

[Glyph]

Thanks for the ticket clean-up :)