Hi,

Please ship the Debian Social Contract, including the DFSG, in a
typesettable version too.  I like to have a nice printed version of
these documents.

Unfortunately, the .wml version used for the Debian website is not
easily convertable to a nice .pdf document.  The attached one is.  You
might want to ship it with the source package, or even add an extra
build instruction to the debian/rules file and ship it in .pdf and .ps
too.

Let me know wether you're interested in doing this, and let me know
which one is your preferred way to handle this.  If you prefer
debiandoc-style .sgml sources, like the Debian FAQ, I'll happily convert
the current DocBook XML one.

Thanks!  Bye,

Joost

I wanted to print the Debian Social Contract, which turned out to be WAY
more difficult then I expected and then it should be.

So I went to https://www.debian.org/social_contract and wanted to print
that. Apparently there isn't a print stylesheet for it, so if you print
that, you also get 'Blog', 'Micronews', 'Planet' and a search box.
Of course I didn't mind the Debian logo.
The last page (of the print preview) shows that it's available in a whole
bunch of languages, which is good, but undesirable for a print version.
And then you get a bunch of links, also undesirable for a print version.

Then I went looking for a PDF version and didn't find anything.

I did find a 'social-contract.txt.gz' (why compressed?), but that's
missing any form of nice formatting (that the webpage does have).
I did try 'zcat <path-to-social-contract-txt-gz>' and editing that in
LibreOffice Writer, but apparently I've lost my skills in office
programs, so I bailed on that.

I ended up using a Firefox addon (Print Edit WE) to strip all the things
I didn't need. That still didn't give me an option to have
- - 1 page with the Social Contract and
- - 1 page with the Debian Free Software Guidelines

(I also lost the Debian logo, but that may be a PEBKAC issue)
It doesn't have to be a 2 page document, but that seems kind of nice.

It really shouldn't be this hard to print the most essential document of
the Debian Project.
It was surprising (and a bit disappointing) that there isn't a nicely
formatted printable document/PDF available.

So hereby my +1 to getting this bug fixed.

Cheers,
  Diederik


- -- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
  APT prefers unstable-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'testing-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (101, 'experimental'), (1, 'experimental-debug')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: arm64

Kernel: Linux 5.10.0-8-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

doc-debian depends on no packages.

Versions of packages doc-debian recommends:
ii  debian-faq  10.1

Versions of packages doc-debian suggests:
ii  firefox [www-browser]                   88.0.1-1
ii  firefox-esr [www-browser]               78.13.0esr-1
ii  ghostscript [postscript-viewer]         9.53.3~dfsg-7+b1
ii  konqueror [www-browser]                 4:21.08.0-1
ii  okular [postscript-viewer]              4:21.08.0-1
ii  qpdfview-ps-plugin [postscript-viewer]  0.4.18-5
ii  qutebrowser [www-browser]               2.3.1-1
ii  w3m [www-browser]                       0.5.3+git20210102-6

- -- no debconf information
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iHUEARYIAB0WIQT1sUPBYsyGmi4usy/XblvOeH7bbgUCYTaBAwAKCRDXblvOeH7b
bt67AP9BUY8KDSj0YMWMbwkBQS8SVcvR19de+lz6FPQX/HHnVgD8Dhffl9+ikEZn
ob3WraENDf4xMZTMSqGJf0kB8X+8YQU=
=v0jd
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Diederik de Haas <didi.debian@cknow.org> writes:

Are any of these helpful? I'm happy to do more iterations – perhaps
using LuaLaTeX and better fonts? This is so far just rushed lunch-work:

https://nonempty.org/~gspr/social.tex

https://nonempty.org/~gspr/social.pdf

Couple of remarks, all in my opinion of course:
- I don't know if there is or should be different versions based on paper size
(A4 vs US Letter).
- I like to have a header which is repeated on all pages and a footer which
says "Page X of Y", so you know those (currently 3) pages belong together and
know the sequence and how large it is in total.
In my LO Writer attempt, I had "Debian Social Contract" on the first page as
header and "Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG)" on second, but I squeezed
things to fit in those 2 pages. Probably not worth aiming for.
*If* there is an official location for the Social Contract, like
https://www.debian.org/social_contract then I'd like to have that in the page
header or footer as well.
- it's not in f.e. the web page, but I'd suggest the "Supersedes Version 1.0
..." on a new line. This prevent the case where '1997' is on a line on it's
own. It's all in 1 line on my printed version, but I decreased margins.
(Whether version history should be part of the document itself is a separate
matter, so I'll leave that aside)
- the header "Debian will remain 100% free"* (f.e.) should be on its own line
and I prefer it to be in "bold" or something like that to visually make a
distinction between the header and the text.
- ideally an item of the Social Contract should fully on 1 page. The amount of
white space on especially the first page is quite high and if that gets
reduced, item 4 should fit on the first page as well. The amount of white space
at the bottom of the pages seems rather high as well. It doesn't bug me, but
if you want/need some extra lines to put text in, you could squeeze some from
that. But not too much as some printers may then run into issues ;-)
It's possibly hard to realize this in a general case, but I assume doable for
this specific document.
- the last part after "Example Licenses" is formatted differently on the
website from the rest of the Social Contract and that seems correct.
The first paragraph gives some history. The 2nd shows a link between The Open
Source Definition and the Social Contract. The 3rd looks like a kind of
license? (without making it explicit; but also outside the scope of this bug)

Cheers,
  Diederik

*) when copying from the pdf the spaces around '100%' vanished, resulting in
'remain100%free'

https://debian.pages.debian.net/debian-flyers/

only English, French and Italian are currently available, but the
sources used to generate that PDF are on
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debian-flyers

would this be useful?

(I agree that making this easier to discover would be a good idea)

That looks nice! So yes, that is useful :-)

I wasn't aware of that site before, so discoverability can and should be
improved.

Cheers,
  Diederik

This works reasonably well:

curl "https://www.debian.org/social_contract.en.html" |\
sed '/^<div id="content">/,/^<\/div> <!-- end content -->/{//!b};d' |\
pandoc -f html -t latex -V geometry:a4paper,margin=2cm -o social_contract.pdf

Diederik de Haas <didi.debian@cknow.org> writes:

Thanks for the feedback.

Daniel Lange's email made me think that there should perhaps be an
authoritative version of the text, from which PDF, whatever-printable,
HTML, etc. can be generated (using for example pandoc)?

But then the question becomes: what is the authoritative version?

I get the impression that https://www.debian.org/social_contract
is (often?) seen as *the* version. But that page is generated from
https://salsa.debian.org/webmaster-team/webwml/-/blob/master/english/social_contract.wml

The homepage for wml according to the wml package is
https://www.shlomifish.org/open-source/projects/website-meta-language/

which mentions "which is an old offline preprocessor for HTML
and XHTML which is sophisticated but quirky and slow" and
the linked GitHub repo has the following in its about section:

"An old offline HTML preprocessor (which can be used for static
site generation), written in Perl and C that is still maintained for
legacy reasons, but probably not recommended for new sites."

Given that, is it wise to have the WML version as the
authoritative one?

Pandoc supports various input formats, but I didn't see WML.
It does support DocBook and Joost did provide a patch which
contains a DocBook version of the Social Contract
(converted from the WML version btw)

OTOH, it feels like I'm WAY overthinking this ;-P

Cheers,
  Diederik

The other copies of it (in doc-debian and the doc directory of the
Debian apt archive) are all copied/built from the version on the
website.

https://salsa.debian.org/ddp-team/doc-debian/blob/master/doc-debian/debian/README.source
https://salsa.debian.org/ddp-team/doc-debian/blob/master/doc-debian/doc/social-contract.wml
https://deb.debian.org/debian/doc/

At some point the website may switch from WML to something else but it
will be a lot of work to achieve.

You could convert to HTML and use that as Pandoc input.

Thank you.
Until you pointed out otherwise, I assumed the .txt version was the original/
authoritative version.

I should've made it explicit in my previous mail that I solely meant the
Social Contract and didn't mean/intend to suggest the whole website should be
in a different format.

Cheers,
  Diederik

Diederik de Haas wrote:

Was the Social Contract approved by a General Resolution?

If so, then the authoritative version is the text that appeared in the
GR ballot.

Gerardo

Aha.  Good point.

As far as I know, here it is:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/04/msg00038.html

Hi,

Thanks for participating in this discussion.  I guess the way forward is to
ship a /usr/share/doc/doc-debian/README file with instructions on the various
ways as posted here on how to get typesettable versions.  (Or anybody has
better ideas?)

Anyway, I'll try to get to that.  (As always: patches welcome :)

Bye,

Joost

PS: and on my todo list is shipping the Debian flyers as a Debian package, in
order to improve discoverability of
https://debian.pages.debian.net/debian-flyers/ and
https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debian-flyers .