\documentclass{dec}
\product{DEC Documentation}
\title{ReadMe}
\pubmonth{March}
\pubyear{2025}
\author{The DEC Documentation Rebuild Project}
\address{GitHub}

\begin{document}

\pagestyle{main}

Welcome to the DEC Documentation Rebuild project.  This project, driven by the community, aims to
recreate as much of the documentation for vintage Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer 
equipment and software as possible.

The reason for this is twofold:

\begin{enumerate}

\item 	Much of the documentation is in a poor state. It can be hard to make out some parts of it due to bad scanning,
		or generally poor source material.

\item	The existing documentation can be very hard to work with. Scanned PDFs, even with advanced OCR, are hard to
		search and navigate. Rebuilding the documentation gives us the chance to correct that with embedded hyperlinks,
		clean text, and a generally more usable experience.

\end{enumerate}

\section{How we are doing it}

It is highly likely (backed up by some evidence from the documentation itself\footnote{For example using a space separated console prompt such as {\tt > > >}
to combat \LaTeX\ conversion of {>}{>} into >> }) the original documentation is written in \LaTeX. In order to try and maintain as much of the original layout and pagination as closely
as possible to the original \LaTeX\ has again been chosen as the method to re-create the documentation. This also lets us separate out the style from the content
making it much faster, once suitable document classes have been created, to recreate documents with the minimum of effort.

\section{Contributing}

You'd like to contribute? Fantastic! We are always looking for more volunteers to help recreate more documents. Just fork this repository and get
writing. Most of the groundwork has been done for you in the form of some handy document classes (dec.cls and decsectional.cls) that implement
reasonably accurately\footnote{Apart from the fonts which we have tried to find reasonable matches for in the standard \LaTeX\ font library, but
has proved almost impossibe - and we don't want to have to use third party fonts to complicate matters.}. By all means take a look at one of the
existing \LaTeX\ files for an idea of how to go about implementing the document.

We only have a few stipulations when it comes to style, both of content and general working:

\begin{itemize}

\item	The hyperref package is automatically included in the base dec.cls file. Please use hyperlinks and hyperrefs within the document
		to link to sections, figures and tables where they are mentioned in the text. Also please use the {\tt \\pdf\{...\}\ } command to
		wrap any references to other DEC documents. This just creates a href to a PDF document in the same directory at the moment though
		that may be subject to change in the future.

\item	Your document should be named by the order number of the document (for example EK-VAXAC-OM-003.tex) with any sub-parts being named the same but
		with a hyphenated suffix (for example EK-VAXAC-OM-003-ch1.tex).

\item	In DEC documentation all figures have a reference number associated with them which denotes the author, their image sequence number, and the
		year of production. When you cut out an image from the original scanned PDF please include this reference number. Name the image file with
		this reference number and place it in the \textbf{fig} folder, then use the {\tt \\fig\{ref\}\{caption\}\ } command to reference it within
		your document.

\item	Title page images should be stored in the \textbf{titles} folder and named after the order number of the document.

\end{itemize}

When transcribing you should attempt to match the layout and pagination of the original document as possible. This is chiefly so that someone
who is referencing the original scanned PDF and someone who is referencing the rebuilt PDF both get the same page numbers for the same information and
can collaborate more seamlessly. Some bleed of paragraphs from page to page is fine, but tables, figures, and sections should be on the same pages
as the original where possible.

\section{License}

These documents are provided with no warranty as regards their accuracy whatsoever. The document class files are provided under the CC-BY 4.0 license
for you to use and adapt for your own purposes as you see fit. We hope you find them useful. The document content and images remain \copyright Digital
Equipment Corporation or the current owner of their trademarks and copyrights (either HPE or VSI at the moment) and are provided and used as an educational
resource for archival and learning purposes.

\end{document}
