Hi Ron, Up to a point I agree we should be planning for scalability and success. I totally agree we should plan from the beginning for internationalisation, and if a toolset doesn't support that, we should avoid it.
I am strongly in favour of good logical markup, so that we can generate a range of different destinations. DITA is one specific way to achieve good logical markup, but not the only one. DocBook *does* support i18n. For instance, the OpenStack project is using DocBook. Their i18n efforts use the Transifex (transifex.com) online service, which is free for open source projects. See https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Documentation/Translation. The message you quoted was an Oracle employee assuming professional tech writers and investing in commercial software like Oxygen. For DITA to be viable for us, I would argue it must be usable by developers with open source tools. We can't expect people to invest any money in order to document OFBiz. Even with free tools, expecting people to directly edit XML in Eclipse or whatever is a still a barrier that will restrict contributions from non-developers. Maybe that limitation is acceptable if the results will be good enough, but "scalability" in theory is no good to us if nobody contributes in practice. I have not contributed one line of documentation to OFBiz, and I am very familiar with IDEs and XML. So I am not the best person to judge these things. I will be interested in the experience of people doing a proof of concept. I will be very interested in the experience of people who don't know much about XML. I don't need to be persuaded that DITA is good, or that it produces good results. I would like to explore whether or not it's *useable* by non-specialists with a little knowledge and training. Cheers Paul Foxworthy -- Coherent Software Australia Pty Ltd PO Box 2773 Cheltenham Vic 3192 Australia Phone: (03) 9585 6788 Fax: (03) 9585 1086 Web: http://www.coherentsoftware.com.au/ Email: [email protected] Small. Complete. Perfect. Your business with BonsaiERP. http://www.bonsaierp.com.au/
