On 4/26/05, Patrick McNamara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > >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? :) > > > > > Hmmm.... No good deed goes unpunished? :) I will accept that position > unless someone else just really wants it? > > > > >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.
Good point. And as long as the documentation is in the hands of a few, that'll work. When we have to make something totally distributed, that's when things get difficult. > 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. A format that converts well to both PDF and HTML and looks good in both cases would be preferable. > > 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. :) How hard would it be for someone to "translate" the wiki? > Patrick M > > Nihongo ga hanasemasu ka. * I think you're asking me if I speak Japanese, and I think the answer might be something like "chotto". But that's probably wrong. :) My background is in linguistics, so I like to take languages apart, but I'm not very good at actually REMEMBERING them. I remember weird stuff, like some of the honorific/humble verbs and some of the grammar, but... _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
