[scribus] some notes on installing the Scribus manual on a tablet

[Gregory Pittman]

I thought I would give a rundown of the process I went through to copy
the online Scribus manual to a new Android tablet I had just bought.

In the end it seemed that using an SSH/FTP/SFTP client was the best
method. This tablet has a USB port, and I could use a USB stick with
that, but it seemed that the size of the directories was too much for my
FileManager to work with -- it crashed on opening the images directory.

So I used the Admin Hands app, setting it up to work in my home network.
I chose to connect via SFTP, after which you are presented with a
directory list, and worked my way to my 1.5.x download - trunk/doc/. You
then select the en directory (or the de or it directory if you wish,
since these are reasonably complete documentation), and touch the small
lightning bolt icon in the right lower corner of the app. Then select
Download and you are presented with your tablet's directory. You 'Choose
This Directory' when you get to where you want it to be. Even with 400+
image files, this went pretty fast, maybe a minute give or take.

The browser part is trickier than I thought it would be. You can pretty
easily use Chrome to get to your device's storage, with
file:///sdcard/en, (presuming you put it as a top-level directory).
The problem with Chrome is when you select menu.xml file for the
manual's menu. For some time there has been an XSL file with the manual
that tells a browser how to turn menu.xml into a web page, with all the
links showing. Apparently, the Android version of Chrome doesn't know
anything about XSL, so it just showed the raw XML text.

So then I went to Firefox. The problem there was that it said it didn't
have permission for accessing the device's files. This was fixed by
going to Settings > Apps > Firefox and selecting Permissions, after
which you turn On the switch for Storage.

NOW I could go back to Firefox, and access the manual via
file:///sdcard/en/menu.xml and Voilà! The menu displayed properly with
all the links! The text was quite small, even on this 10-inch tablet,
but this was very much helped by going to Settings in Firefox (the 3
vertical dots in the upper right corner), and selecting under
Accessibility, 'Use System font size'. I can still tweak the zoom with
fingers, but mostly don't need to now.

It took me a while to figure all of this out, so I thought I would pass
it on. So now I have the manual even when offline.

Greg