> From: Quinton McCombs [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > I am all for changing the format for documentation. I have never looked > at the docbook format. I guess I will take a look at it. I would like > a format that can be rendered to PDF as well. I would like to see the > user manual available in PDF format. The Avalon project has a nice > manual in PDf format. It just seems to give the project a more > "finished" appearance... Amazing what little things like that can do.
Hello. You have probably noticed the conversation I inadvertently started on turbine-user by mentioning docbook in my reply to Jeff Linwood's "Turbine Concepts" thread where he offers to contribute his article. Henning, I appreciated your response to his thoughts, as I had thought many of the same things but was unsure of writing them. Thank you. However, Jason makes two good points that I should keep in mind as I try and lead this effort. First, content should be the focus over and above the mechanism. Second, there are standards in the Apache Jakarta world that should be respected. And, I am keeping these in mind when I say that I agree now would be a good time to adopt a new format for the Turbine 2 User's Guide. I have worked this weekend to create an xdoc outline of the User's Guide as put forth on the wiki, and I can already tell that the system leaves something to be desired in terms of formatting. It will be even worse when we want to export the manual in a new format or use delivery method like zipped html. I would like to see something that makes it easy to: *Repurpose the document in many formats including html, pdf, html-one-page-per-chapter, html-zipped, html-tarballed, etc. *Make dynamic inline references to other parts of the document (no matter what the final output format is!) *Footnotes *Index *References I don't have any experience with docbook, but research yesterday seems to indicate it would work pretty well, and be rather complicated. Forrest or Cocoon are options, as is MS Word (yeah, I know, but it is an option). Thanks, Chris --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
