Since these will be printed on real dead paper and sent out in the
world, it seems like it may be a very good idea if we can identify what
version they were built from.
Without this it looks a little bare. Note that this is not an actual
heading, because otherwise the Table of Contents will appear in itself,
which is weird.
By setting the `role=bare` property on these links, the URLs do not get
included in the text of the print PDFs. While we want to include the
URLs for most links, in some cases it doesn't add anything and is just
disruptive to the flow of the text.
Specifying `media=print` changes Asciidoctor so that URLs are included
inline in a way that can be read in printed media. For printed manuals
this is obviously what we want, though we should still keep the regular
version around for the binary distributions, since they retain the
internal links.
When uploading to Lulu.com an error was being produced, and with some
experimentation I discovered it was due to the `[%always]` tag used to
force page breaks; removing it fixes the problem. To ensure the Table of
Contents appears on the right page, I added a small amount of copyright
blurb to page 2.
This required some adjustment of the template to increase the size of
the box on the rear cover containing the text.
Text was translated by Google Translate; I have not yet had native
speakers verify the accuracy of the translations.
We generate the previous SVG by doing sed substitutions to insert the
front cover and spine titles, plus the rear cover text. A follow-up
commit will generate the French and Spanish covers as well.
This is not invoked as part of the normal build process, and shouldn't
be: we only ever want to build the cover PDFs when we're uploading them
for printing, and don't want everyone who wants to build Freedoom to
have to install Inkscape. However, we should nonetheless include it in
the CI to check that the build step works.
Since we want this to become an actual book, we need the generated PDF
to properly look like one. This required a bit of Asciidoc mangling but
mostly looks right.
Having this will allow us to put up printed Freedoom manuals for sale.
The SVG here is compatible with the template provided by lulu.com, which
is where I'm planning to put up the online store. Lulu expects a PDF, so
there's a Makefile target that uses Inkscape to convert the SVG to PDF
format.
The cover artwork here is by Reddit user Illustrious-Gift4206 who
created fanart of many of the Freedoom monsters. Ony my request he has
graciously agreed to donate his artwork to the project for use.
Currently this is just the English version of the manual cover. I'm
planning in a follow-up commit to convert the SVG into a template, so
that we can autogenerate covers for all the different translations.
Addresses #1370.
I've removed a page break between the installing and menus section since the fix causes one line from the former to spill over onto a new page.
The following changes should make the manual more available, and easier
to understand:
1) "make dist" and "make install" will now include all translations of
the manual.
1) A "freedoom-" prefix will be used in all cases in place of just
"manual".
2) All languages will have a two letter suffix, so English is now
"-en".
3) Only the PDF specified will be built when invoked in the top level
directory. For example:
make manual/freedoom-manual-en.pdf
asciidoctor-pdf outputs a warning when ordered lists are numbered
entirely with "1.". It wants actual consecutive integers or ".". Prior
to this fix there were 14 warnings such as:
asciidoctor: WARNING: manual.adoc: line 234: list item index: expected 2, got 1
in the English and French manual. Interestingly it makes no difference
in the PDF produced, but let's minimize the number of warnings in the
build.
Some of the table columns were not large enough to fit the text, or the words themselves were too big when smaller words would have done.
Lots of single-word lines at the ends of paragraphs.
Removed a bit of redundant information.
Vital links in the submitting/visiting sections needed to have visible URLs in case one really did print them out.
Added a copy of the BSD licence and a link to the website.
- Made E1M1 more beginner friendly (keycards is optional for secret)
- Upper starting area door opens consistently from both sides. Switch is gone and that corridor is shortened
- There is a little trail of health bonuses guiding the player to the least damaging way to reach the armour
- Soul sphere in upper area is now red armour
Turns out it's a perfectly functional word for this purpose in Spanish.
The English "device" double entendre, however, is apparently untranslatable. (Please correct me if I am wrong on this.)
Continuation of #1091. Closes#1096. Hopefully addresses #992, subject to better terms from an actual Spanish speaker.
Corresponding changes have been added to Spanish translation using machine translation. All reasonable efforts have been used to try to vet the output so it actually makes sense but it will need an actual Spanish-speaking reader; I've got an alternate version that *only* does the obvious fixes (but will not address #992) if this turns out to be irredeemably bad.
**Obvious Fixes**
- Converts a few stray CxMy references.
- Updates some screenshots that still showed old assets.
- Fixes a lot of miscopypasted alt text.
- Does not claim DBSG to be "twice" as powerful.
- Adds Handgun pickup sprite.
**Terminology**
- Addresses #1096 by restoring abstract references to health and armour.
- Adds distinction between "refill" and "boost" for health.
- Gives pickup messages a distinct verb for each class of item being picked up.
**Clarifications**
- Much more explicitly describes certain monster and weapon behaviour, avoiding excess kayfabe where it may produce misleading descriptions.
- Makes the deceased name appear as the first element in all obituaries, and uses the same term for the "same" weapon where a monster is using an equivalent to a player weapon.
- Rewords some obituaries to better match the Freedoom monsters rather than the id ones.
- Emphasizes that the misconception is that Freedoom is *only* about providing a gratis IWAD, to better avoid the unintentional reading that it is a misconception that Freedoom is being provided gratis.
**Organization**
- Makes new sections for keys and the general introduction to how items work.
- Moves the colorblind section to right after the new key section.
**Putative Target Audience**
- Adds an explanation of what a source port is.
- Adds the "press Enter a bunch of times to start the game without reading anything" trick.
- Adds a warning about Chocolate Doom's savegame buffer overflow emulation.
- Adds a detailed tutorial walking the player through a live example of every type of ingame interaction.
- Rewrites all the controls-related help to presuppose a modern, post-WASD boomer shooter paradigm, doing away with the previous-century assumptions that you only had turn and forward/back and lateral movement was an unusual extra.
I've seen multiple Youtube videos recently that talk about Freedoom as
though the "free" part in the name refers to price. It's an
understandable misconception but it deserves to be corrected. Let's add
a short section to the manual to discuss this.
- Edited out the references to "Cannon".
- Clarified that F11 isn't an on/off toggle. (The Spanish seemed fine?)
- Reworded the missile description to do damage to imply it works better on *lower*-level monsters rather than higher, since the tripod and bigtech are both immune to the blast.
- Created new illustration of the savegame menu to replace that "C" with an "E".
commit 89f918f517 last year changed the manual to build as an A5
booklet. However, some of the tables now look very compressed with the
smaller page width. We can make things look a lot nicer by reducing the
number of columns:
* Weapons table: sprite column is eliminated (sprite is kept, but moved
to the name column), and ammo column (moved to description column).
This is a reduction from five columns to three in total.
* Special items table: name and description columns are merged. This is
a reduction from three columns to two.
* Monsters table: name and description columns are merged. This is a
reduction from three columns to two.
This seems like a better choice for the manual since it is a "booklet"
size similar to the original Doom manual, rather than a "full page"
size that is rather unusual for a book.
Several changes are needed to allow asciidoctor to successfully produce
a PDF. The main change is to set a bunch of images to 100% width,
especially in tables where this means "100% of cell width". This allows
the tables to scale down successfully to the smaller size. I have also
adjusted the column widths of various tables to accommodate the smaller
size without the text wrapping awkwardly.
A generic term like this isn’t really suitable for trademark, nor
likely to ever be disputed. The community and the engine both heavily
bias toward “episode” and indeed most other games do.
Closes: #682
