I'm pretty active on the #flightgear IRC channel and people there told me to start discussing my idea here and perhaps on the devel mailinglist.
I've written a simple python script which iterates over all Airplanes in FGDATA and does some stuff with it. Basically, it automatically generates LaTeX files, which are then compiled into a PDF.
This is useful for eg. having your aircraft documentation on (e-)paper and just having documentation bundled.
Current features:
0) It takes the name of the aircraft and puts it in a title, together with a thumbnail and a table of contents.
1) It takes all files ending in "checklist.xml", it parses them for some commonly used ways of writing checklists for flightgear, it makes it a bit human readable and then writes them into a pdf.
2) It takes the subdirectory Docs of the aircraft. If it contains extra LaTeX sources, it copies them over and includes them.
Extending this simple script with more alike features can render some pretty nice .pdf files.
Planned extra features:
- Enable airplane developers to easily add documentation, without the knowledge of LaTeX, by adding additional .xml or alike files to the Docs folder, i.e.
* Aircraft specifications (max takeoff weight, cruise speed, max passengers, range)
* Procedures
- Having a website (or a subdomain of flightgear.org) where you can search and download the precompiled .pdf files.
I added some extra files in the Docs folder of the 777 series to have some example https://cloud.glycos.org/public.php?service=files&t=8f66c6a18171d88bc8b8530ab4394913.
EDIT: the red bounding boxes won't be there when printed; they're just indicators for having links within the pdf. Pretty useful if you ask me.
Please give me your opinion and extra ideas.