Michelle Caisse wrote:
Jørgen Løland wrote:
Rick Hillegas wrote:
Laura Stewart wrote:
On 11/14/07, Lance J. Andersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Perhaps this is an indication that we need to revisit the layout of
the
manuals to make them easier to use and put this as a high priority for
things to address going forward. If the documentation is difficult to
navigate, this can be a turnoff to users.
Regards
lance
I think that what we really need to invest in is changes to the code
that generates the docs, so that an index can be created with the
output. Many index entries are already in the DITA files for the
documentation and are not exposed because the code that generates the
output is not setup to support index generation...
+1 to the idea of generating an index. The old Cloudscape index used
to be very helpful and I think that a lot of that work has been
preserved in the existing index entry markers.
This may be a silly question, but why are we using dita when there are
good tools for this? Why aren't we using LaTeX?
We definitely need a tool that can generate an index, but the UI for
creating docs in LaTeX is very cumbersome, awkward, and inefficient. Of
the mark-up languages I've used (nroff, html, and LaTeX), it is the most
difficult to work with.
Agreed -- I used TeX (not LaTeX, I think) for a bit 10-11 years ago. I
felt fortunate that I was only making minor changes to existing docs
rather than producing new text.
Kim and Laura, I'm curious if you use an xml editor to edit the DITA, or
do you use a text editor?
I use a text editor. I tried to use ArborText, which accommodates the
DTD just fine, but found that it changed the line endings in the files,
making the diffs invalid -- that is, the diffs file showed changes in
addition to the actual content changes. It also sticks an Arbortext
comment into each file.
Kim
-- Michelle
