Rebuilding P&P

[Matijs]

The Choinski Family wrote:
>
> Ill show a hand for the project.  Easiest way is to probably go
> through the rules item by item (they ARE all numbered for our
> convienece :) and vote to keep or toss (or change) each item.  Whe
> done we can reorganize.
>
> I volunteer table making.  I got pretty good at it when I was working
> on my own modified rules, and I can greate a nice EPS peiple can
> import into the main document.  This in addition to rules kibitzing.
> :)
>        -- Burton

Some thoughts on all this Net Project stuff:

Going through the rules item by item would probably lead to chaos, if
there is no plan beforehand on what 'we' want changed. Whether we all
want the same things changed is another matter. It might be more
worthwile, as a start, to just keep the existing rules, updated with the
published errata, corrected spelling, and clarifications where needed.
Any house rules and additions would then be up to the individual
players.

As Wout has pointed out, this is pretty much what our group has been
doing for the past few years (yep, it's a slow process). The sources are
all human-readable. They were in LaTeX, to allow postscript or printed
versions to be generated. (No, I don't consider PostScript
human-readable, at the moment). Recently, I've converted them to XML,
and now both LaTeX and HTML versions can be generated from that. We
decided on XML to ensure that the layout can be changed at will. If,
e.g., tables are produced directly in EPS format, this would be, IMHO,
very hard to do. Also, the XML encodes all versions we would want to
produce: An exact copy of the original books, a version with errata, and
two versions with additions and house rules.

Matijs.