Hmmm.... No good deed goes unpunished? :) I will accept that position unless someone else just really wants it?
Another thing to consider is to have one person in charge of collecting all information together, periodically publishing document as it stands. I did that with the software model, and it worked well enough.
You are taking an interest in this and making excellent points. Perhaps you would like to consider being in charge of this? :)
Doumo arigatou gozaimasu.**
Dou itashimashite.
Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, I'll add my comments to today's replies.
I agree that the focus should be on content, not form. However, I can say from experience that form can sell content. One of our target audiences is the corporate world. Given two documents with the exact same contents where one is the dump of a wiki and the other is a nicely and professionally laid out document with nice formatting, I can tell you exactly which will be picked and which will be rejected.
I pulled down LyX an played with it today. Perhaps it is just different enough from my normal methods of document creation that I haven't grasped it yet, but I had the hardest time making it do my bidding. Actually, I think that was my problem. I was trying to make it do what I wanted instead of letting it do it's job.
OpenOffice and it's associated format are good. But... There is always a "but". The built in version control (i.e. diffs and merges) is disabled as soon as an index or table of contents is added. That is a royal pain. Also, since it is a binary format, Subversion doesn't handle merging it all that smoothly.
As far as wikis go, I've worked with them before and they can be incredibly powerful tools. However they are not designed for creating publishable documents. You can't go download the contents of a wiki and print it out on the office printer for later reference. Ok, so actually you can, but it's not easy or pretty. I would also prefer, if at all possible, to keep the requirement, specs, and any other docs in the same repository as all the other stuff. It makes it easier for all involved to be able to go one place and get anything you might need.
It looks like some tools and scripts exist to convert between DocBook and OpenOffice (and maybe OpenDocument) formats. The Open office DocBook export works, but i seems to lose all the formatting.
I must admit I'm still at a loss. For the time being, I would suggest we start using the wiki. It is a very useful dumping ground for ideas and I don't want use to get stuck trying to figure out how we are going to produce something as "simple" as documentation. :)
Patrick M
Nihongo ga hanasemasu ka. *
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