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<title>How to Update the JMRI Documentation</title>
<meta name="author" content="Joseph A. Ellis - TesserAct Studios">
<meta name="Revised_By" content="Bob Blackwell - afticarr@sympatico.ca">
<meta name="Revised_By" content="Egbert Broerse">
<meta name="Revision" content=
"Updated instructions for GitHub instead of single file edit and ZIP">
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<h1>How to update the JMRI Documentation</h1>
<div class="toc">
<ul>
<li>
<a href="#screenshots">Creating Images from Screen Shots</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="#sizing">Sizing and Saving the Images</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="#submitpage">Submitting to GitHub</a>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p>JMRI's web pages and help screens are written in a simple subset of HTML, the language
that powers the web. The most important part of the content is the plain text that people
will read, and the additional formatting information is kept very minimal. To update a JMRI
web page, you edit these directly on GitHub web or on your computer with a plain text
editor.</p>
<p>Using a word processing app like MS Word or Front Page to edit these .shtml documents is
not a good idea because they will probably add in their own proprietary formatting codes that
will mess things up, possibly even to the point of being unusable by JMRI. Also, don't rename
existing files, or make changes to the formatting information at the top or bottom.<br>
So you may concentrate on making editorial changes to the text in the main body of a file,
which is really what the readers are paying attention to anyway.</p>
<p>To get started, you can drill down inside your computer's JMRI program files to the folder
for the DecoderPro manual. On a Windows system, the location for this folder looks something
like this -- <code>C:\ProgramFiles\JMRI\help\en\manual</code>. In this folder is a file
called <code>index.shtml</code>. Open that file with a text editor and look around. If you
change something, you can then open the page in the JMRI help system and see how it looks
(either keep a backup in case you want the original page back, or you can reinstall JMRI to
restore it).</p>
<p>The most simple changes are just ones to the text itself: To add a sentence or fix a
wording, you just do that with the editor. To add a break between paragraphs, e.g. to add a
new paragraph, you insert a "tag" that tells JMRI or a browser to insert a paragraph
break.</p>
<h2 id="screenshots">Creating Images from Screen Shots</h2>
<h3>For Windows</h3>
To snag a screen shot in Windows, start by setting up the window that holds what you want to
capture. Make it take up as little space on your screen as you can while it still shows what
you want. You can take a shot of the active window (instead of your whole desktop), by
pressing the <code>&lt;Alt&gt;</code> key and the <code>&lt;Print Screen&gt;</code> key at
the same time. (Note: Depending on your keyboard, you might need to press the
<code>&lt;Fn&gt;</code> or <code>&lt;Function-Lock&gt;</code> key as well.) This puts the
image on your "clipboard" and you can paste it into an image-editing program such as Window's
Paint or Photoshop.
<h3>For Linux</h3>
If your distro doesn't already have a default application that supports the use of the
&lt;<code>Print Screen&gt;</code>&gt; and &lt;<code>Alt + Print Screen</code>&gt; keys you
can install <a href="https://kde.org/" target="_blank">KSnapshot</a> or your favorite
application to do your screen grabbing.
<h3>For macOS</h3>
After setting up your shot, hold down <code>&lt;Apple + Shift + 4&gt;</code> key. When you
release them at the same time, the cursor becomes a plus sign, and you can drag it around the
area you want. When you let go, you will have an image file on your desktop.
<h3>Using a Third-Party Application</h3>
<p>On macOS we nowadays often use Evernote <a href=
"https://evernote.com/intl/nl/products/skitch" target="_blank">Skitch</a> to grab and touch
up screen shots. Here's an example of that style:<br>
<img src="images/GitHubPencil.png" alt="GitHub Pencil"></p>
<p>We also love <a href="https://www.irfanview.com/" target="_blank">IrFanView</a> for
screenshots, and it is free. With it, you can also include your mouse cursor in your
snapshot. You can also take a series of shots easily, and even make a slideshow of them. You
can tell it what file format you want the image files to be AND where you want them to be
saved before you take the shot, and that makes it easier to work with them in a program like
Paint or Photoshop.</p>
<h2 id="sizing">Sizing and Saving the Images</h2>
Any changes you make to your image should be done before you use Amaya to insert it into your
document. Remember that if you change it, it needs to be re-inserted. Make sure you save the
image as one of the following filetypes: PNG, JPG, or JPEG (not BMP or TIF), and do not use
any spaces or capital letters in the image file name. Generally, a good size for the width of
an image is 500 pixels or less, at a web resolution of 72 pixels per inch. If you know how to
resize your images, it would be very helpful.
<h2 id="submitpage">Submitting to GitHub</h2>
<p>If you understand this, you are ready to help us update the many JMRI documents that we
use for both the JMRI website and for the Help files in a next software build.</p>
<p>When you submit your changes to be included in future JMRI releases, they are given a
quick check and then merged into the previous content. The check is done by using GitHub
tools to find the parts of the file that have been changed.</p>
<h3>Prepare the Files</h3>
The proper filetype to use for JMRI has the .shtml extension. If you have made a (new) .html
or .htm file, you should change the extension to .shtml. Don't use spaces, underscores or
capital letters in your filenames. If you are not changing or adding images, just save the
file with its original name, i.e. <span style="font-family: monospace">"index.shtml"</span>,
in a location where you can find it easily when you're ready to copy them to GitHub.
<h3>Send to GitHub</h3>
<p>You can view the current <a href="https://github.com/JMRI/JMRI" target="_blank">JMRI
repository on GitHub</a>. To learn how to make changes to connect to GitHub and contribute
your changes, please read <a href="getgitcode.shtml">Using Git</a>.</p>
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