Need to make the documentation a bit prettier

[martindholmes]

The documentation output has been bugging me a bit, so I'm just going to wade in with some CSS proposals in a branch.

[martindholmes]

@joeytakeda Any more suggestions for this? Or is it good enough for now to close the ticket?

[joeytakeda]

It looks better to me, but I do think there could be more work done to make the documentation nicer, but as sort of a blue-sky, ongoing thing. We could close this now and open a new ticket, or keep this ticket open to keep track of any improvements we think of?

[martindholmes]

Let's keep it open and keep the branch too.

[joeytakeda]

Given the comment on Feb 22, I'm going to kick this to Blue Sky (but feel free to move if you disagree)

[ebeshero]

@joeytakeda @martindholmes I have started a university class of junior/senior undergrad Digital Project Design students experimenting with staticSearch, and I think we should have some suggestions for the documentation in a few weeks. I was eager to give this a whirl with them to implement it on my own projects, so let's see how this goes.

One of my students is a double-major in computer science, but most of them are mainly digital arts, do gitHub and project management, learned XML stack stuff from a couple of earlier courses with me. They represent an interesting middle space of tech proficient/git-knowledgeable designers. They learned to code their own HTML/CSS in the context of GitHub Pages, so it makes sense for them to continue learning what they can do with static sites. I suspect what this group comes up with might help make the documentation more accessible to DH people generally.

I just forked the repo to my newtfire organization, and I'll come back here and ping you as we come up with things. Right now we're scrambling over installing Apache Ant on everyone's different machines--figuring out what we need for the Windows users (most of the class)--is a slight hiccup that I think we'll sort out this week.

[ebeshero]

One thing we agreed is: it would be helpful to list out the dependencies required near the top rather than down in 7.7: staticSearch download/clone, java, ant, ant-contrib...test to make sure all systems go.

[martindholmes]

@ebeshero Thanks for this -- I'll look at it now.

[martindholmes]

The section on requirements is now there. There's obviously still a lot of work to do on the documentation CSS, in particular relating to section widths, which are too narrow for example code blocks.