On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 11:24:46AM +0900, Bengt Thuree wrote: > > On Fr, 2006-04-07, 09:32, David Grant skrev: > > > But why do you even need docbook in the first place? Why not just use > > mediawiki? > > > > I definitely recommend putting all the documentation in some form of > > wiki or drupal form so that anyone can edit pages easily. > > > > Ok, I am definitely not an expert in this area :) > Anyway, having it on a wiki format would be great for the easy of updating > it. You have to be online to do serious work though. > > But docbook is the standard format for documentation as far as I > understand, and after checking the links it seems to me that the various > tools to convert from wiki to docbook is at beta stage, and with not > perfect result yet. > > DocBook can also be formated to a number of different formats, which is > not easy to do from mediawiki. > > I can imagine a lot of people would like to have a small hardcopy > (printed) manual next to them when they are using GnuCash for the first > few times, or just simply checking up on the features and how to do > things. > > The other things with anyone editing the files. Where will we store the > sample databases? As it is now, it seems we will have one database for > each chapter and store it in SVN together with the various chapters. > > I agree though, updating/creating the document through a media like > mediawiki would be a lot easier. Am not quite sure that the end result > would be suitable though. Or? > > A possible compromise would be to start the work in MediaWiki, and then > move it (manually perhaps) to DocBook format and possible "remove" the > MediaWiki entry, since we can only have one original. This would give us > the DocBook advantages, with MediaWiki creating advantages. Yes, not fun > with the manual conversion to DocBook though.
I think this is a pretty good compromise. I would say that it's a firm requirement to have the docs available in some offline form. DocBook is a very appropriate format for that. If the wiki->docbook conversion is workable, great. If not, I think the advantage of wider editing of the docs out-weighs the disadvantage of having to manually reformat them for offline use. One question: does our use of MediaWiki now, instead of Drupal, preclude us from using a wiki->docbook conversion tool in the future? Another option we _might_ be willing to settle for would be static html docs, which I suspect are easier to produce from a wiki. -chris _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
