Folks,

While the final content of the v3.8 documentation is certain to change (at a minimum I
want to update the Windows section, plus replace all images with larger ones), we
thought it prudent to spin up a docset to test the generation process since it has not
been run since the server crash a while back.

As some of you may know, the documentation on the Wiki is considered the master, and
thus we have some PHP code which pulls the content directly from the Wiki database,
modifies it according to our needs (e.g. converting wiki markup to HTML, pulling the
images out of the wiki file storage), and then outputs the filesets I will refer to
below.

In addition a special version of the windows docs are generated (separate from the
tarfile) from which the HtmlHelp CHM file is generated.

Due to changes in our OS install post-crash (particularly the PHP version), the PHP
scripts had to be updated to work with the current setup.

I'd like to make a shout-out to forum regular jr who took on the task of getting this
all going and making the filesets I'm about to reference.

Because we have had immense trouble with AI bots scraping the site (they almost all
ignore any robots.txt directives*) and also because we do not want these pre-release
docs indexed by any search engine, I will not put the full path to the docs here; I am
sure you can work it out :)

They are on the povray site, in temp/05May2026Docs. There you will find three tarballs
(Mac, Windows and Unix) plus a Windows HtmlHelp file (.chm). There is also an online
viewable version of the unix docs (identical to what's in the tarball, I just
extracted it as-is).

I ask that you please do NOT share the full link anywhere public, and in particular
not in any site on the web that could be indexed by search engines.

* see my followup post as to just how bad it was

-- Chris

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