That was user guides. I'm talking about help documentation, though the DITA approach could certainly handle user guides with ease as well.
And remember, there is more than one doc team to consider here. And once of them would like to use DITA. -Rob On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 5:46 PM, Greg Stein <gst...@gmail.com> wrote: > I seem to recall an email from the doc people that they wanted to > stick to their current toolset and infrastructure, rather than bring > that to the ASF. My take-away from that message is that the OOo > documentation is written by other/downstream people, rather than as a > deliverable from the ASF. > > Cheers, > -g > > On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 17:10, Rob Weir <apa...@robweir.com> wrote: >> Would it be worth considering using DITA for the documentation/help? >> >> I love ODF as much as anyone, but DITA was designed specifically for >> technical documentation, and has built-in facilities for making >> modular "topics" that then can be reassembled, with a "map" to >> assemble larger works. This gives you the ability, for example, to >> have paragraph that only shows up in the Linux version of the doc, but >> not in the Windows version. >> >> You also get an easy ability, via the DITA Open Toolkit (which is >> Apache 2.0 licensed), to transform the DITA source into a large >> variety of output forms, including: >> >> HTML >> PDF >> ODT (Open Document Format) >> Eclipse Help >> HTML Help >> Java Help >> Eclipse Content >> Word RTF >> Docbook >> Troff >> >> The authors focus on the structure and content, and the layout and >> styling is deferred until publication time. So you have a great deal >> of flexibility for targeting the same content to various uses. >> >> The other nice thing is that DITA is text (well, XML specifically), so >> we use SVN to manage the content, can do diff's, merges, use the >> editor of our choice, etc. >> >> I'd like to argue for the advantages of DITA as a source format here. >> I can probably find some volunteers to help enabled this. The >> Symphony team uses DITA for doc/help, and we've already done the work >> of converting much of the OOo help to DITA. >> >> -Rob >> >
