The Misty Manor, Mercers

In addition to the PDF of the current edition available for purchase on Scribd and the html version available for free browsing on our site. There is now a (free) partial draft of the 2nd edition manuscript on Scribd.

What is changing?

The second edition will give the Herbal a much needed overhaul and facelift. The PDF version, in particular, will be much easier to use with cross references, working index, and so forth. Making the document more usable on e-readers such as the Nook™, Kindle™, netbooks and so forth is a major goal. The section headings/organization will also be much more consistent throughout and I want it t be easier to find common/scientific names quickly. The sample file online should give people an idea of where this is going and the tool chain I am building can be reused for other projects in the community (e.g. the County Restoration Handbook.

What will stay the same?

I will always have the lion's share of the Herbal's information online for free. I will likely keep the same split as current: a free online version for quick browsing and sales of PDF, print, and CD versions for offline reference. Purchasing the PDF from Scribd will help defray some of the costs of this project and will probably make things happen more quickly. Another way people can help is to give me access to other ebook readers (such as the Kindle and color Nook). If you have one and are willing to test drafts of the manuscript on your device, please let me know.

How does it work?

For those who are interested, I am using a tool called LyX to write the manuscript. LyX is a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Mean (WYSIWYM) technical document editor which uses the LaTeX document processing engine underneath, itself built on Donald Knuth's TeX type-setting system. It is actually a much more advanced form of what I used to write my Baccalaureate Thesis many years ago.

LyX will let me write the document once and deliver it in HTML, PDF, a light-weight PDF for ereaders, and possibly printed/bound through a service such as Lulu, all from the same file.

Basically, LyX now gives the self-publishing tech-writer a suite of tools better than what most publishing houses had available not that long ago--- for free. It generates the various tables-of-contents, indexes, bibliography, and cross-references (more than half of the effort in a project like this) automatically whenever they need to be, figures out how to position figures and floats, combines dozens of separate files smoothly into one document, and produces beautifully typeset output to boot. These are tasks I had three people dedicated to doing on a tech-writing project back in the mid '90s in addition to the people writing the text itself.

What can we learn from this?

In the locavore movement we are just taking baby steps in figuring out how to share information, highlight best-practices, avoid making the same mistakes someone else has already made. The thing is, the free software movement ("free" as in liberty, not as in beer--- Open Source) has been doing this and doing it well since it got off the ground in the 1970s. There is something to be learned from that. I have an entire operating system (Linux) plus computer graphics and desktop publishing system running on my laptop written piece-by-piece by thousands of volunteers over thirty-plus years. If we can do half as well for local food and self-sufficiency as Richard Stallman, Eben Moglen, Linus Torvalds and company have for software, we will be doing quite well. Knowledge is wealth; sometimes the best way to gain wealth is to share wealth.