On 17/02/10 9:29 PM, Andrus Adamchik wrote:

* Authoring process (do we have to edit XML by hand?)

That's one way (and for developers not rocket science since the xml is fairly 
simple). I looked long and hard for the easiest to use tool for our technical 
writer here (who isn't particularly a developer) and the one I settled on was 
Oxygen Author. Not free. There are some free tools as well, but not as wysiwyg. 
I never tried OpenOffice.

* Maven support

Should be easy I think. At the worst, maven can call ant scripts. I'm happy to 
donate ant scripts I've written, but there isn't much too them.

* I assume the same doc source can be published as HTML on the web, and
as PDF for the release. What does it take to wrap HTML in our site
template? A Velocity template I guess?

That's the really beautiful part. I personally like XSLT, but there are a few 
ways to get the output. We also set up PDF output with minimal effort.

In short:

* authoring tools for docbook are poor to middling, but Confluence is hardly 
perfect
* flexibility of output is great
* commit the whole thing into svn (branching and everything else that entails) 
is brilliant
* moving everything across is lots and lots of work, especially getting all the 
links to still link and tying in all the screenshots


Ari Maniatis

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Aristedes Maniatis
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