On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Ken Gunderson <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-05-30 at 08:24 +0400, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
>> Switching to another less popular doc format doesn't seem like a great idea. 
>>  I don't work with the documentation frequently, but I'd ask people that do.
>>
>> One thing is that some of these formats are like fads... they come and go.  
>> I remember not long ago when SGML was all the rage. :-)  From my perspective 
>> it would be good to have a format that has good tools available (multiple 
>> implementations, at least some of which are portable to other platforms), 
>> displays nicely, and provides some basic structure capabitilities to assist 
>> in parsing for content or format conversion (e.g. to HTML).
>>
>> If you make me install a bunch of new tools, or learn a format that nobody 
>> else uses, I probably will be less inclined to write documentation.  (That 
>> said, I've not written much except a few man pages, and the format of 
>> *those* is relatively constrained by the need to be able to display them 
>> with the man command. :-)
>>
>>   -- Garrett D'Amore
>
> I would think Docbook would be the way to go.  Yeah, it's going to
> require some specific libraries and tools but it's transformable to many
> different formats.  I haven't dealt with it for a while now but easily
> to morph to man, text, html, and pdf, which I think pretty much covers
> all reasonable bases.
>
> XML situps are a pain after the first few thousand.  Last I looked most
> good XML editors out there were proprietary. All fine and dandy if
> you're a commercial corp with a documentation staff but such would seem
> to raise the bar w/o much of any real gain for a small FOSS project.
>
> Else maybe the old standard Latex, wh/facilitates same, and although out
> of vogue at present, I don't think it's not going to disappear anytime
> soon.  Advantage here might be that lots of science and math types will
> already be somewhat familiar w/it from thesis writing and such, but I'd
> also think this would not encompass a significant number of OS/IllumOS
> contributors.

Hi, All

This is  my personal experience on this matter.

Having  use both Docbook and LaTeX to on a few manuals before.
I actually retracted back to use LaTeX from docbook as documentation
tools to create Manual/Book.


> I've never heard of Sphinx.

Me either.

So to me, Docbook is acceptable but LaTeX is the best tool, IMHO.

tj
>
>
>
> My $0.02, fwiw.
>
>
>
>
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-- 
T.J. Yang

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