On 9/21/06, Clinton Begin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm not resistant ... I just haven't heard any better alternatives.
..and I am not so crazy about DocBook either, just wanting to explore it more.
Developer/Author criteria: Accessible - OOo is free.
So is XMLMind's XXE.
Easy - OOo is WYSIWYG, familiar word processing paradigm.
So is XMLMind's XXE, *to some extent*. You don't get to choose fonts, etc, because the idea is that you are capturing content and structure then applying styles to it later - instead of implying structure from styles. The free version allegedly has a spell checker...but it sucks, unless "Chekc Miy speeling" is all spelled right.
Portable - OOo is available for all desktop platforms that I know of.
XXE is just Java.
Participative - OOo fails at this, it does not seem to encourage participation despite the above accessibility and ease of use.
Yeah...hmm, XXE sucks at this, too. I guess you can modularize the document, so that people can work on different sections at the same time easily, so that's useful. But as far as easy collaboration, it's no WIKI. ;-)
Quick Changes/Deployment - OOo fails at this too -- modifying the docs and deploying the result is a PITA and therefore discourages updating.
Same as above. A docbook file is like source. It would have to be rendered, then deployed, just like the current docs (the PDF part of the current docs, I mean). It could be automated though.
User/Reader criteria: Printable - OOo can produce PDFs.
XXE, too.
"Bundlable" - OOo can produce PDFs that can be included with the distro (and is now).
XXE, too - and it can be easily automated with ant.
"Downloadable" - OOo can produce PDFs.
Check.
Multi-format - OOo can actually export to PDF, HTML and DocBook....although it sucks at the latter two
DocBook rules here. Period.
Searchable - OOo has good search facilities, as does PDF (google can search them), we can export to HTML for web search.
DocBook can provide all of these formats, too. XXE has a search feature, so you can search in the editor reasonably well. It work with multi-file documents as well.
Other alternatives discussed so far: Confluence excels at Participative and Quick Changes, but fails in many others including Printable, Downloadable, Bundlable -- unless one page at a time is good enough. DocBook exels at Multi-format output but fails on Accessible, Easy, and Participative. Others I'm forgetting? Thoughts?
I hate XML as much as the next guy. But XXE makes it pretty painless (after the initial shock of "How do I set the font?!") to edit DocBook documents. Looks like the .NET guys are using DocBook, I wonder how they do it and like it? Larry
