Since last fall I've been lurking on discussion lists for open-source documentation projects (e.g. Fedora), open source standards such as DocBook, and tool-specific lists such as oXygen XML editor. The following quote, from someone involved in a major open source project, sums up the assessment I get from people who have spoken with me about DocBook:
"The reason why DocBook is the tool of choice is because it gets the job done and everything else is worse. [Most of] the tools are free software. You get the output formats you need: HTML, HTML Help (for Windows), tolerable print, man pages, plain text. It's easy to work with for a decentralized team because the sources are plain text that you can check into CVS. "Everything else is worse: Wikis are only online. Word is just a terrible tool altogether, and you can't run cvs diff on it. LaTeX is weird, so is Texinfo. Everything else is either very limited or unfinished or nonexistent." -- -- | Karen G. Schneider | Community Librarian | Equinox Software Inc. "The Evergreen Experts" | Toll-free: 1.877.Open.ILS (1.877.673.6457) x712 | [email protected] | Web: http://www.esilibrary.com | Be a part of the Evergreen International Conference, May 20-22, 2009! | http://www.lyrasis.org/evergreen
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