Hello to you all, the development group in which I work is facing some documentation issues. After evaluating how we could tackle them with our current commercial tool, we came to the conclusion that we needed to look at alternatives. We have been using cocoon-based XML document generation in our solution for some years now, so Forrest was an obvious candidate. And it turned out that it can fulfill most of our needs as good (and sometimes even better) than the tool we now use. The extensible nature also allows us to overcome the problems we have with the current tool.
However, there are a few functional holes that will need to be filled before we can migrate. What we need the most is : * conditional blocks : we should be able to tag parts of the documents and include them based on settings. * placeholders : text values that we can assign based on settings so that they can receive different values when generated for another target/customer. * JavaHelp output format : parts of the documentation need to be accessible from a JavaHelp module. I have looked at the plugin extension points of Forrest and have some ideas on how to fix them. As a first step, I made a prototype to handle the conditional blocks and the placeholders. I made a somewhat detailed description that already uses these 2 features. My question is the following : could you spare us some of your time to have a look at it and let us know what you think of it? Main question is whether you are interested in it... if you judge that the things we are looking for are very specific to our situation, we'll develop it as part of our specific build process. If you see some general use in it, we could develop it as a public plugin. Any advice is of course also welcome. I've set up a small site to store the proposal : http://uk.geocities.com/kullervo16/forrest.html Thanks in advance. Jef Verelst. __________________________________________________________ Sent from Yahoo! Mail. A Smarter Email http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html
