MPTW Documentation Best Practice

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bluespire

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Apr 28, 2012, 4:35:19 AM4/28/12
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I'm translating a large number of telecom troubleshooting documents into an MPTW. The most complicated once I have thus far is 43 pages including screenshots with multiple chapters and sub-chapters. My question is what would be the "best practice" in inputting these types of documents?

Here are my thoughts thus far:
  • Store each image/figure as individual jpegs.
  • Break each section into its own tiddler
    • Tag each section with its respective chapter
  • Tag each chapter with the document name
My thinking is this: breaking the whole thing up into small chunks of data will make searching easier, rather than pulling up a monolithic document on one search. It will also help cut down on loading times, since each sections has 1 or 2 screenshots (53 total). Maybe I can make the document tiddler have an option to transclude all the sub-tiddlers? I don't know how to do this, however. Thoughts?

I have another problem, as well. the TW is stored on network storage. As such, anyone that opens it is opening as a local file, and will be able to edit it. Is there anyway to make editing impossible on a local file without some kind of key?

twgrp

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Apr 28, 2012, 5:41:04 AM4/28/12
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Hi bluespire

First off, you ask for "best practice" in the headline but I'd
guess(!) there is none because TW is such a general tool that what you
describe has probably not been done by many.

That said, I would say that this would be a LOT easier to do if you
deal with text instead of pictures. Perhaps you've taken screendumps
on a pdf? Did you know that you can actually select text in a pdf doc
to copy paste into a text editor? (select by left click and dragging
mouse).

An idea to actually get it into tiddlers in TW is to put this text
into a spreadsheet(!)! This way you could relatively easy move
sections under one another vertically and add your desired tags next
to each. Export as CSV into eg. Notepad and then copy-pase into
tiddlytools CreateTiddlersFromCSV [1] that takes an actual CSV text
and converts it into tiddlers!

You will (for sure) have to experiment a bit with a smaller experiment
to get the details right.

If you do intend to use the picture version anyway, you may wish to
follow one of the current discussions here on how to display pictures
from a Picasa album [2] or possibly other storage. (Interestingly, at
least IMO, I just last night posted that perhaps it could be
generalized into a more general file handling system.)
This does not quite address your issues but if(!) it were to develop
into something where individual items in a gallery display can be
tagged then it could probably work.

Note: generally, you should only show pictures in TW via links.
Storing actual pictures in TW makes it very big and slow, but links
are smooth.

<:-)

[1] http://tiddlytools.com/#CreateTiddlersFromCSV
[2] http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki/browse_thread/thread/b85ca91c8bb092e3


On Apr 28, 10:35 am, bluespire <gswrut...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm translating a large number of telecom troubleshooting documents into an
> MPTW. The most complicated once I have thus far is 43 pages including
> screenshots with multiple chapters and sub-chapters. My question is what
> would be the "best practice" in inputting these types of documents?
>
> Here are my thoughts thus far:
>
>    - Store each image/figure as individual jpegs.
>    - Break each section into its own tiddler
>       - Tag each section with its respective chapter
>    - Tag each chapter with the document name

HansBKK

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Apr 28, 2012, 8:03:18 PM4/28/12
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On Saturday, April 28, 2012 3:35:19 PM UTC+7, bluespire wrote:
I'm translating a large number of telecom troubleshooting documents into an MPTW. The most complicated once I have thus far is 43 pages including screenshots with multiple chapters and sub-chapters. My question is what would be the "best practice" in inputting these types of documents?

Here are my thoughts thus far:
  • Store each image/figure as individual jpegs.
  • Break each section into its own tiddler
    • Tag each section with its respective chapter
  • Tag each chapter with the document name
My thinking is this: breaking the whole thing up into small chunks of data will make searching easier, rather than pulling up a monolithic document on one search. It will also help cut down on loading times, since each sections has 1 or 2 screenshots (53 total).

I've taken this approach, but only when I really need to reference individual sections in different contexts.

Use a prefix number scheme to maintain ordering and present a given "collection" by the document/chapter/section tags as you indicate.

The "top level" navigation can drill down into more specific manually-created ToC tiddlers, and glossary/index pages can also assemble tiddlers based on "topic term" tags.

Steve Rutter

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Apr 28, 2012, 11:22:28 PM4/28/12
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I'm sorry I didn't make myself clear. The document is text AND screenshots. I'm only mentioning them, because I have to deal with them, and like you mentioned, I don't want them to bog down the TW. The pics are stored on the network drive in a sub-folder. My concern is how to organize the content for the best use of the users.

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Steve Rutter

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Apr 28, 2012, 11:25:04 PM4/28/12
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Hans,

I don't understand what you mean by this: "The "top level" navigation can drill down into more specific manually-created ToC tiddlers, and glossary/index pages can also assemble tiddlers based on "topic term" tags."

Tobias Beer

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Apr 29, 2012, 3:23:12 AM4/29/12
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Maybe what's mentioned at the bittom of this will help: http://tobibeer.tiddlyspace.com/#ShowDown

Look for pagr.

- tb

twgrp

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Apr 29, 2012, 7:44:55 AM4/29/12
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HansBKK

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Apr 29, 2012, 1:31:35 PM4/29/12
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On Sunday, April 29, 2012 10:25:04 AM UTC+7, bluespire wrote:
I don't understand what you mean by this: "The "top level" navigation can drill down into more specific manually-created ToC tiddlers, and glossary/index pages can also assemble tiddlers based on "topic term" tags."

For "reference" TWs like this, I will usually manually create a "master top-level ToC page" tiddler that displays automatically. The links on this page could of course go directly to chapters and sections, but if there are multiple "books" or separate "documents" together in a given file - as you seem to have - then each one of those "books" or "documents" will have their own independent "ToC page".

Only when you get down to the chapter/section level will you see the "tag-assembled" and "title-ordered" collections of individual actual-content tiddlers. OK, that's it for "ToC" style navigation.

I also often have glossary/index pages, either manually created or as navigation menus based on a tree as in Executive TWtree template. These create links that show all tiddlers tagged with index-term tags, like a traditional end-matter index in a reference book. This may not be necessary if the terms are already knows to your users and full-text search is sufficient.

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