[ale] Structured Documentation

[gharri2 at emory.edu]

Shoot, this is one of those perpetual projects that I never get far along on. In
my messing around, though, I've found a few things.

Getting an editor that doesn't scare away the folks you would depend upon to
maintain the documents, & yet deals with arbitrary XML elements & schemata
(that is, something other than *HTML) is not easy, except when it's not cheap.
I have not had sufficient success with doing so in OpenOffice--the steps are
laid out clearly:
http://xml.openoffice.org/xmerge/docbook/
but it didn't entirely work, the last three or so times I tried it (& I had the
same unsatisfactory results using the Text Encoding Initiative DTD & Sebastian
Rahtz's stylesheets).

Conglomerate ( http://www.conglomerate.org/ ) is pretty close to what I was
hoping for, but the problem is in my workplace, which is MS, exclusively.

DocBookWiki is pretty interesting:
http://doc-book.sourceforge.net/homepage/
At the bottom of that page, the related links include demos, such as the
Albanian Constitution (kushtetuta).

Cocoon/Lenya is what I mean to mess with next:
http://lenya.apache.org/
I'm wondering if either the BXE or kupu editors will work as I hope.

David Tolpin wrote a What You See Is What You Mean plugin for jEdit, but
withdrew it soon after making it public. Durn. Here, though, is the user guide:
http://www.davidashen.net/PreTI/jEdit/users-guide.html

Grady Harris
Grady Hospital Branch Library
Quoting ale-request at ale.org:

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 21:58:02 -0400
From: Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net>
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: [ale] Structured Documentation
To: ale at ale.org
Message-ID: <1124589482.18405.35.camel at angel>
Content-Type: text/plain

I'm looking for open-source ways to generate and maintain structured
documents.

When I say "structured documents" I'm talking about technical or
procedural manuals suitable for printing or screen reading.  I'd like to
be able to create a revision history on a part-by-part basis such that
if I made a change to part 3.1.7, a new version of the entire doc would
be generated and a look back at the previous version would show the
pre-change 3.1.7.  Or, if I selected 3.1.7 and did some kind of history
call-up on it, I'd see the current version plus all previous versions,
their dates, and who modified them.

Anyone know of anything in existence that works close to this?  I've got
an idea in my head somewhere between Lyx and how Gentoo's online XML
docs work.

Jeff



------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 08:05:34 -0400
From: "James P. Kinney III" <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Structured Documentation
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
Message-ID: <1124625934.25626.54.camel at merlin.localnetsolutions.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

On Sat, 2005-08-20 at 21:58 -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
I'm looking for open-source ways to generate and maintain structured
documents.

When I say "structured documents" I'm talking about technical or
procedural manuals suitable for printing or screen reading.  I'd like to
be able to create a revision history on a part-by-part basis such that
if I made a change to part 3.1.7, a new version of the entire doc would
be generated and a look back at the previous version would show the
pre-change 3.1.7.  Or, if I selected 3.1.7 and did some kind of history
call-up on it, I'd see the current version plus all previous versions,
their dates, and who modified them.

Anyone know of anything in existence that works close to this?  I've got
an idea in my head somewhere between Lyx and how Gentoo's online XML
docs work.
Sounds like a CVS/Subversion system for documentation to me, Jeff. If
it's written in XML the output can be any format you want. An article in
Linux Magazine
https://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/30/OpenOffice_Revision_Control.pdf
may have some ideas.

Jeff

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Message: 5
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 15:46:06 -0400
From: Jim Popovitch <jimpop at yahoo.com>
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Structured Documentation
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts <ale at ale.org>
Message-ID: <1124653566.3616.3.camel at localhost>
Content-Type: text/plain

Sounds like a Wiki would satisfy all that.  I personally like MoinMoin
as it is written in Python and simply works well.

-Jim P.
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