The Unity project's Library folder is inflated by NoesisGUI's included documentation, which is supplied as a lot of html pages and images.

New project with NoesisGUI/Docs folder: 165 mb
New project without NoesisGUI/Docs folder: 30 mb

I'd suggest to offer the docs as a separate download or replace the HTML files and images with a single file such as a PDF.

Of course users can currently choose not to import the folder or move it out of the Assets folder, but it may be overlooked.

Hi!

Hehe, the documentation. What a nightmare. There is no way to tell Unity that we do not want the doc folder to be ignored. For example, images inside that folder are also being preprocessed (although we manually disabled compression to reduce cpu stress).

Having the documentation in PDF format is not easy because our documentation pipeline is heavily based in markdown + CSS. Also, I think that navigating in HTML is easier than in PDF.

We discussed about this months ago because we wanted to solve it in v1.2. But we didn't found a good solution:

• Not including documentation at all and linking to the web seems fine but we though that having local documentation corresponding exactly to the installed version was convenient. We could have the documentation for all our released versions at our server (noesisengine.com/docs/1.2.0, noesisengine.com/docs/1.2.1, noesisengine.com/docs/1.2.2, ...). The main problem of this solution is that it would increase the bandwidth requirement of our server. And the problem that the server could be down...
• Providing the documentation in a zip. Not very friendly.
• Providing the documentation in a unitypackage. Fine, but you end up with the same problems as soon as you install it. Besides, many users will probably overlook this step.
• Install the documentation in a system folder for the current user. We could do this as an extra step with a button in the welcome screen. Interesting but not very Unity friendly.

What do you think?

Thanks for pointing out about this.

I hope you don't mind if I give my opinion to this subject.

I think the best way is to provide the documentation online (perhaps for the various versions) and also have a zip file containing all the html files. This allows me to put the content to any place I like.

I dislike most things that force something on me, such as placing it in a system directory without having a choice or using this Unity-archive where I need Unity to be able to open it. Using a unity package would also mean that I have to remove all the unncessary files (e.g. *.meta) and move it to its target location afterwards. So a simple zip file would be much easier to handle.

But if it's a zip under the Assets folder, most people will mindlessly unzip it right there. And then you get the same problem with the bloated library folder again.

Maybe a script launched once after importing NoesisGUI could move the zip to the project root, one level above the Assets folder.

Or just offer the zip as an extra download and save the space within the unity package.

That may be the best idea. Actually, I don't think I've ever opened the documentation from within the Assets folder, I've always used the website anyway...

Another alternative: having the zip inside the .unitypackage itself. But when you decompress it, the root folder starts with ".", that way Unity ignores the content of that folder. It would be decompressed to ".Doc" for example.

The decompression step could be done when the package is installed or manually by the user.

I wouldn't do that as there are some restrictions regarding directory names starting with a '.' under Windows, ".Doc" wouldn't be allowed for instance.

Also like movra I have never used the contained docs. The first thing I do after importing the package is deleting the provided samples and docs. If I really have to take a look at the documentation I'll most likely use the online documentation. If it is contained wihtin the unity package it just takes more time to download and import.

We have planned to solve this in v1.2.5. We still don't know how exactly. : )

What do you think about this one?

1. The documentation is included in a zip inside the .unitypackage
2. When you install the package, we decompress it and copy the documentation next to /Assets, we are already using folders at that place (eg: Dumps and Temp).

Sure, fine with me.

Of course the script needs to check whether the zip has been imported at all. And the script might have to delete the zip and itself afterwards, otherwise it keeps unzipping whenever the script is re-imported.

An alternative to automatic unzipping seen in the Rewired asset is that on import an installation dialog is launched, asking if you want to install the documentation locally.

By the way, since we're talking about the organization of the package: Unity 5 doesn't require the strict folder structure for plugins anymore. I'll open a new thread about it.