On Friday 2006-01-06 at 15:50:34 +0900, JC Helary wrote: > > On 2006/01/06, at 14:40, Tim Cross wrote: > > In reality, it would be good if documentation was in an even more > > 'generic' form, like docbook or sgml so that there is more > > flexibility in final format choices. However, decent authoring > > environments for working with such formats as docbook are > > expensive or, in the case of free and open source, still quite > > limited/slow to work with. > > > > I guess the main thing is that the format used is less important > > than consistency - though there is the open question regarding > > whether the use of texinfo as the 'official' documentation for a > > project actually results in less useful documentation than would > > occur with a more widely known markup language. > > It would be nice if the source format was an easily translatable > format: are there xliff convertors for it ? for example. > > .po based conversion are ok, but localisation standards have greatly > evolved in the last few years and opensource tools are following > very close. > > Docbook-xml would seem like a good choice.
I tend to use docbook-xml myself (though I haven't used it for software documentation) and would have thought it an obvious choice. I've never used TeXinfo, but if it's anything like LateX, then docbook would be at a higher abstraction level, better separating content from presentation. Adequate free tools seem to be available to work with it, but it can be painful to get set up initially. Texinfo could be easier in that regard, perhaps. Anyway, that's just my 2c worth, because I was surprised docbook-xml wasn't mentioned earlier. Cheers, David -- David Trudgett http://www.zeta.org.au/~wpower/ Honesty subverts! -- Kendall Clark _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
