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Flight Manual 4.1 online

The Flight Manual for version 4.0 has some errors and missing bits and should have been updated long ago. The changes in 4.1b are of course also not covered by the current edition. The problem is that the documentation was created in a proprietary content management system that belonged to a company I no longer work for, and I do not have access to those tools anymore.

So, updating the manual at this point means taking the raw XML files, writing my own XSLT transformations and formatting objects, and parsing the lot through a free formatter like Apache FOP. For those of you who have not yet fallen asleep, this is basically a tedious process including a lot of manual codewriting to get the final result to at least resemble something printable.

Boring as that may sound, I have started doing exactly that. My first step was to write some XSL stylesheets to be able to present the XML content online while updating it.

This documentation is still a work in progress and is updated daily at this point. A printable PDF version will probably follow once the 4.1 version of Draken is released.

Stay tuned /Tom

LINK: Online Flight Manual – Draken 4.1