On Friday 30 December 2005 16:26, John Sundman wrote: > The sources to the documentation are in (all paths relative to the top > lps dirctory): > <snip what="Description of documentation src locations"/>
OK, it's as I thought, the doc system is a propriety solution XHTML-like in source. While the current system works, I think that getting to know it and enhance upon it will be prohibitive for most people. When I say most people, I take it that the willing author will have some technical knowledge or would not be editing the XHTML sources in the first place. With few people understanding how it is hung together, it will also be a bottleneck in an open development environment. Sticking to a standard will open the opportunity for writing docs and enhancing the processing system. It would, IMHO, be a better solution to adopt Docbook as the standard format. The DTD is documented and so are the stylesheets. I see some of the processing tool chain is already in SVN. As most of the project is Java I would say the following environment would fit right in: Ant (or GNU Make) Saxon (enabled extensions) FOP (enabled extensions) Docbook DTD Docbook XSL DITA may also be a solution. Although I am not yet happy to use it on production systems, if the project is willing to eat dog food, then so am I :-) I see lots of duplication in content and the need to repurpose content for different readers. There are a number of techniques we can use to help overcome the problems. If I was to think of a way forward, I would suggest we do a test run. Implement a short, but reasonably complex, document into docbook and build the batch processing and custom layer systems for it (PDF, HTML (single page and chunked)). That way we can get to grips with the difficulties together. The reference manual can be made allot easier to maintain and develop if we modularize the documentation into components and normalize across the doc system. The risk. Can we document the next release and complete the new doc system before the next release? If we have enough time. I estimate that we can do the transformation to the new system by end of January. What is the release schedule? Let's start the new year with a challenge :-) Happy New Year. -- Sean Wheller Technical Author [EMAIL PROTECTED] +27-84-854-9408 http://www.inwords.co.za _______________________________________________ Laszlo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.openlaszlo.org/mailman/listinfo/laszlo-dev
