
ACEDB newsletters
=================

Currently this newsletter is sent to:

		acedbg		the acedb usergroup
		<many other people...see my circulation list in pine>

It is sent at the beginning of each month and its purpose to keep users in touch with
whats going on in acedb. It's not supposed to long winded, just a quick summary.

I keep the newsletters in CVS as html docs, they are copied nightly to the acedb
web home page directories by the updateftpdoc script and can be viewed from the acedb
homepage.


Scripts for newsletters
-----------------------
Several scripts are used to prepare the newsletters and associated gubbins, they
can all be found in this directory (winfo/Newsletters):

	cvschanges	- use this to find out what's changed in cvs

	html2txt	- use this to turn a newsletter into plain text
			  for emailing to users.

	mkindex.pl	- use this to prepare/update the index file for each
			  directory containing a years worth of newsletters.




1) Preparing a new newsletter
-----------------------------
Copy the newsletter template in this directory (Newsletter.template.html) into
the appropriate file (e.g. Year2001/June.html). Then edit the newsletter making
sure to replace all occurances of "***" with appropriate text.

You can get an idea of what changes have been made to acedb by using the
cvschanges script to look at the cvs change logs.

Now add the new newsletter to the cvs repository.


2) Turning a newsletter into plain text for emailing to users
-------------------------------------------------------------
The newsletter is sent out in plain text form in emails. This is accomplished in the
following way:

1) use the perl script html2txt to prepare a specially formatted copy
   of the news letter, e.g.

   >  html2txt < Jan.html > Jan.new.html

2) View the new html document in netscape (don't worry that it looks a bit strange):

   > netscape Jan.new.html

3) Use the netscape "File" -> "Save as" menu option to save this file
   as plain text.

Now cut/paste this plain text file in to the email and send it out.

The reason for using the html2txt script is that it will put in underlining of
headings which netscape does not do (it also does bold).

Once you've sent it out, you can chuck away the text version of the letter.


3) Updating the index file in the Year subdirectory
---------------------------------------------------
Now you need to update the index file to include the new newsletter. You will
need to check out the index.shtml file in the Year directory containing the
new newsletter. Then run the mkindex.pl script against the directory:

  > mkindex.pl YearNNNN

Now check back in the index.shtml file.


4) Updating the index file in the Newsletters directory
-------------------------------------------------------
Currently this is done by hand by simply cut/pasting the htmlised index for
the current months newsletter from the YearNNNN/index.shtml file into the
index file at this level. Just follow the laid out pattern, should take
2 minutes to do. REMEMBER to change the links from e.g. ./May.html to
./Year2001/May.html !!

Really mkindex.pl should handle this as well and do it
all in one go.
