First install on our server of the wonderful fiduswriter

Fidus Writer development
1

Hi Friends,
I’ve just installed this wonderful tool to manage our standard documents. I’ve got a few questions about it… Is there already a scheme to automate the documentation in fidus writer? This would mean the following in our minds:

  1. Autogenerate document numbers in a complex manner, such as
    blahMoreBlah_<issue#>Lang<amendment#>
  2. How to embed variables and call them out such as {@doc_code} $doc_code or something like this.
  3. How to have a header and footer in the documents in HTML view (dividing the info into pages that would eventually get printed.
    Thanks a bunch!
2

Hey @Aeronut ,
good to hear that you like it. We don’t have anything like those points right now. You can file issues on those in the Github repository, but it would also be good to know what exactly is meant by each one of them:

  1. I assume this is to be the initial name of a document when it is first created? Where would the variables/counter be taken from?

  2. There are document templates, so you can do some things like create a field called doc_code that the user then gets to fill out, very similar to a form. But I assume you here want to obtain these variable values from some other place?

  3. Are you asking for dividers in the editor to see where pages will start and end? Unfortunately, that is not really possible given the current state of technology. At the beginning, we were using CSS Regions, which allowed us to make text flow between different non-continuous areas. That technology was unfortunately removed from Chrome. Adding something similar without it would mean a significant slow down in longer documents as we would constantly need to calculate where one page starts and another ends.

3

Dear @johanneswilm,
Thank you very much for your response. Please allow me to respond to your questions:

  • Yes, it will be the initial name of the document based on certain rules. These are quality documents that we need to keep track of. There are certain rules that one needs to follow, such as the document name, document purpose, document area (the specific area that it is for), document type (procedure, report, data, etc), issue number, amendment number, release state, and release number. These seem complex but they follow a simple logic. In fact, for instance, the release state has three states, (work in progress) WIP, (approval review )REV, and (released) R, and actually it could be a list of selections that one could use.
  • You’re right the doc_codes could be obtained from other variables in linked documents or from a template.
  • Exactly. If that is not possible, we could easily export this to a LaTeX document where we could pass these things in template form.

Do you think that these are additions that could be of use to others and if you would be interested in adding these to the current fidus writer?

Thank you so much!