Back at the end of October last year, a discussion started about finding
a replacement for our process to build our documentation. The reason
being "The issue has become even more serious since switching over to
Windows 10. All ooRexx docs still build (with slightly less appealing
fonts) except for rexxref. Tested on two Win 10 machines, any rexxref
build fails with a c0000005 exception about 99% of the time, but
eventually successfully builds in 1 out of a 100 tries.� A real pain."
This quote from Erich summarized the issues he was experiencing using
the Publican tools that have been our only method of getting our
documentation built.
I volunteered to "slog" through the process starting with investigating
using the Pandoc tool as a potential replacement for Publican. When that
effort didn't "pan" out, I started looking for other tools and in early
December I reported the first build of one of our documents using some
other tools. There were issues still to be resolved (and many still to
be discovered!) but the approach seemed worth pursuing. As a result I
stated "My goal is to develop a package containing the tools that anyone
can download and install that will allow them to build our docs on
Windows 10 from a fresh checkout from SourceForge with minimal changes
to those files."
I am happy to report that this goal has now been achieved! In addition,
with the help of P.O. Jonsson and Rony Flatcher, we now also have
packages that run on Mac and Ubuntu Linux. These produce documents that
are indistinguishable from those produced on Windows. All three packages
are available on SourceForge in the tools folder of the docs section -
.../docs/trunk/tools/.
In addition to having no reliance on Publican, the packages use the most
recent versions of the Docbook DTDs and style sheets and Apache FOP.
However, the source files remain usable by Publican so we have not
"burned any bridges" in developing these packages.
For anyone interested in trying one of these packages, I strongly
suggest you download and read the file "read1st.txt" in the Windows
package as a first step. It fully documents what is involved in
generating our documents using the package.
As the packages are now in SVN, please report bugs and request
enhancements through the ooRexx ticket process.
--
Gil Barmwater
_______________________________________________
Oorexx-devel mailing list
Oorexx-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oorexx-devel
