> From: Jason van Zyl [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > Hi, > > Was just chatting with Bob in IRC about supporting Latex > within Maven as a documentation tool and I know that Cocoon > will be an option too so does anyone have any thoughts on how > to handle this generically. > > I know a couple of projects, including drools, that have a > lot of Latex documentation so it would be good to support (in > addition to Latex being very cool) and tons of people use > Cocoon so I think it would be good to support that option as well.
Here is where I start spouting my Component Oriented Programming doctrine :) Plugins are a type of plugin, so in order for it to work, we need to define the contracts and relationships with Maven. In this case we are talking about documentation, so we need to understand commonness and differences between the documentation standards. First: Documentation formats for TeX/LaTeX, Cocoon, and DVSL are all very different. Cocoon is pretty flexible in that it can work with any XML format (I don't recall if LaTeX uses something different from XML or not...). DVSL templates are basically just a way to add more formatting to a minimalist HTML file. (Yes I know that they can be used with generic XML, but I haven't seen any templates that allow better semantic representation of the documents like DocBook affords). Given that fact, and the fact that different projects may have different standards for documentation, we cannot force a standard XDoc format. Second: Not all engines provide standard stylesheets that can be easily exchanged (instead they are site-wide or computer wide settings). However, we do need to work with systems like DVSL/Cocoon that allow you to specialize the look & feel--or at least work with different source documents. So the two contracts we can really extend to the document rendering tools are 1: the directory where the source docs are located, and 2: the directory where the control/stylsheet docs are located. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
