Shapely Manual
This is more or less the final content and format of the Shapely 1.0 manual. I struggled a bit with the choice of format and writer to use. If it had any math I'd probably have reverted to LaTeX, but I'm dodging the math with links to the Java Topology Suite docs and evasive statements like "just go ask Martin Dr J(ts) Davis". OOWriter's HTML export didn't cut it and there was little support for Python code syntax highlighting. Proprietary software or formats were out of the question. Finally I settled on docutils, restructured text, Pygments, and the Pygments code-blocking version of rst2html in the docutils sandbox (also included in the current Trac). The restructured text source is at manual.txt. It works well and looks sharp thanks to a stylesheet from Dave Kuhlman's odtwriter page.
If you're using Shapely, I'd appreciate your feedback on the manual. It's the last ticket on the Shapely 1.0 milestone.
Comments
Re: Shapely Manual
Author: Christopher Schmidt
Any reason you chose a different license for the docs than for Shapely itself? Apparently the debian-legal list consider CC licenses to be 'non-free' under the DFSG (!!), though the 3.0 licenses have made it into Debian in the past, so perhaps paying attention to debian-legal in this case is just the wrong direction for actually getting things done. If you don't mind, I'd be willing to package up Shapely for Debian once you release a 1.0 and maintain it there going forward if I can find a sponsor. In any case, it feels weird to have the docs available under a different license than the software. The manual looks great, btw. You might want to ask Howard about adding RST support to your trac instance? I think there's a way to make the docs automatically turn into RST HTML in the browser view... Though it looks like you might know that, so ignore this if it doesn't make sense.Re: Shapely Manual
Author: Sean
You may be right about the manual license. I've been proposing to change Shapely to BSD already. The combination of GEOS Debian packages and PyPI Shapely packages is already more than sufficient (for me, at least), but a Shapely Debian package would be welcome.Re: Shapely Manual
Author: Christopher Schmidt
Er, I thought Shapely was under BSD? "I've been proposing to change Shapely to BSD already." doens't make sense, since PyPI and LICENSE.txt both say BSD...Re: Shapely Manual
Author: Sean
I responded thoughtlessly. Shapely has been BSD licensed since November.