Frank Peters wrote:
...
Joe, thank you, thank you for bringing that up and pointing to the
elephant. There is much truth to what you write and actually I
think we need to revisit the documentation "strategy" for OOo,
meaning how will we produce, maintain, and publish documentation.
...
Reading over it again, my post seems more negative and accusatory than I
meant it to be. That was not my intent and I'm sorry it came out that way.
I'm so glad to hear that you are open to discuss a difficult question
and are interested in considering all options.
Again, my experience is neither broad nor up to date, but as I see it...
Some overall goals are:
* To provide excellent an collaboration environment for contributors.
* To write one source document and have that be easily transformable
into the needed user formats.
* To provide links between related topics in different documents (i.e.
different /projects/!), so the user can browse efficiently.
Here are the technical areas where OOo/Writer/ODF seems to distract from
those goals:
1) Revision control: some way to support 'patches', discussion and
revision management.
2) Better transformation of ODF into non-print formats. E.g. to be able
to take the User Guides and offer them in a nice web format with no
manual effort.
3) An 'enforced' style vocabulary: some way to prevent authors from
departing from the template.
4) Separation of content and formatting: allowing the visual style to be
tweaked (or completely overhauled) without having to change the source
document.
I agree, this a great opportunity to hone OOo on a challenging task, but
is a project like the OOo documentation really a good fit for the OOo
product? Do people want to use OOo for collaborative production of
online and print documentation?
Well, thanks again for listening, and 10x more for all the good work
from the doc project; the guides are invaluable and I think the web
availability of the online help, along with a good search function, will
be a superb resource.
<Joe
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