Jean Hollis Weber wrote:
Gary,
Regardless of the merits of your case, *someone* would have to do all
the things that need to be done. Choose a DTD, modify it as needed,
configure whatever needs configuing, set everything up to work
smoothly, and then actually produce output in needed formats from the
source files. Are you volunteering?
And even if someone sets all this up and is willing and able to do the
work in producing output, what happens when that person is not
available? Everything comes to a screeching halt, or goes on hold for
a long time until someone can find the time to catch up. That's a
major bottleneck.
If the original source files are in .odt, then anyone can carry on as
we are doing now. Not ideal, but low-barrier, no-cost, no outside
programs to learn, no specialist knowledge required. No distraction
from producing CONTENT. Easy to make a PDF. Easy (if tedious) to put
the same info on the wiki. No drama.
If your proposal (for multiple outputs) can be grafted on to that
minimalist base, AND you or someone will actually do it, that's cool.
Go for it.
--Jean
Be advised that I did not bring up any issue of using DocBook XML
authoring, template creation, or editing. I just noted that the DocBook
plug-in of Writer was designed for version 4.1.2 during 2003 and were
never fully implemented. And any documentation of its use is somewhat
esoteric.
Usually, structured authoring is done by larger organizations
(governmental units or their contractors, businesses with large amounts
of data, documents, etc.) that want to maintain and dispense their data
or documents systematically. Also smaller organization use it too, if
they desire uniformity with their documentation. Having structure makes
it easier to create and maintain their data, so that if somebody leaves,
another could step it and take over from there.
The conventional non-XML systems at many nonstructured organizations can
be somewhat byzantine because few other than those at the very top of
the documentation food-chain might be aware of what others are doing. In
addition, they could prefer one format over others, so that it may be
very difficult to employ multiple differing formats simultaneously.
No dig at any particular organization, BTW. What makes XML attractive is
that the data and documents that are stored in XML can be readily
adapted to various disparate output formats more automatically once the
appropriate templates are created to employ whatever of the XML data the
medium needs. XML-based publishing could be considered as residing at
the other end of a spectrum that has manual-override writing/editing at
its other pole. More structure and less chaos.
One particular nice feature of FrameMaker is employing conversion tables
for importing a conventional FrameMaker document using formatting tags
(or an imported MS Word or even a OOo Writer file saved as DOC--using
paragraph and character styles) and eventually imparting structure from
them into a structured FrameMaker document. The DocBook elements can be
assigned to the appropriate paragraph and character styles in the
original document and the various table, and graphic elements are also
assigned to DocBook elements.
After a number of iterations in fine-tuning the conversion table,
suitable renderings of DocBook XML is then applied to those original
documents. The better the conversion table is "programmed," the more
closely the original documents of similar styles can be converted into
DocBook, somewhat automatically. And eventually formatted, if desired.
Gary
