On Sat, Dec 21, 2002 at 11:14:19PM -0500, Alan Gerhard wrote:
> So embarking on an old fashioned word based document is really not
> the way to go.
>
> I assume the reasoning behind this decision to use XML, etc. is to
> allow for a more collaborative environment and give greater control
> over maintenance. What, then, would be the best way to contribute
> to the documentation efforts ? Assume that I have no XML authoring
> tools or the like ... just a desire to give something back !!
Just a suggestion from the peanut gallery; some folks recently
put up an apache wiki at nagoya:
http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?
I believe I actually read about the wiki here on james-user. In
any event, wikis are an excellent tool for collaborative document
development. I'm not sure how featureful this one is, with respect to
formatted text, but speaking as somebody who was, at one time,
professionally employed writing software manuals, the content is far
more important than the formatting.
The next question is how you'll get from the collaboration to a
downloadable doc. I don't have any idea on that one, other than to
either use a professional-grade tool (my first choice would tend to be
Framemaker) or use XML and pump it through Cocoon. Since the apache
wiki is a perl script, and it apparently uses a single data directory,
it should not be a huge deal, given cooperation from the nagoya wiki
maintainers, to write a perl script (or a java program) to roll
through the appropriate data files and convert them to XML.
Steven J. Owens
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"I'm going to make broad, sweeping generalizations and strong,
declarative statements, because otherwise I'll be here all night and
this document will be four times longer and much less fun to read.
Take it all with a grain of salt." - Me at http://darksleep.com
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
