Re: [Gnu-arch-users] doc formats

[Mark Flacy]

On 2006.01.19 20:35, Thomas Lord wrote:
> Mark:
>
> > Heaven forbid that we'd use DocBook
> > (http://docbook.sourceforge.net/).> Or LyX  (http://www.lyx.org/).  Or  
> even TeXmacs
> > (http://www.texmacs.org/), for crying  out loud.
>
>
> Those may be very fine tools but two of the three of them
> don't provide anything at all like the functionality
> I was talking about.
>
> Docbook may very well be useful for this project but
> not as the plain-text format and therefore, ideally,
> not as the source form.

You can produce plain text from it as well as other useful formats.  You don't  
need a fancy editor to create documents with it, but there is support in Emacs  
for it.  (There's minor support for it in LyX, for that matter.)

http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/OtherOutputForms.html

nxml mode for Emacs (http://www.thaiopensource.com/nxml-mode/) provides fairly  
painless support for creating and editing XML files that are defined by  
Relax-NG schemas, as well as continuous validation of the document while you  
type.  DocBook version 5.0 has a Relax-NG schema and is thus supported by nxml  
mode.

While DocBook is hated by quite a few people, I've found it to be flexible  
enough to generate anything that I need in whatever format that I desire.   
It's been around for 10 years or so (counting the SGML versions with DSSL  
style sheets) and is mature enough so that you can actually get  
non-documentation related work done.  It's also under constant review and  
improvement by folks who really get into designing that sort of thing, versus  
those of us who simply want to use it.

> > Reinvent the wheel; that's the ticket.  I thought that I was reading >  
> comp.lang.forth for a minute.
>
> Nobody is reinventing the wheel.

In this context, I find that hard to believe.  However, I'm not in the Arch  
users mailing list to read about or discuss documentation formats; if you wish  
to have the last word in this branch of the thread, go for it.  This is too  
off-topic for my tastes and so I will refrain from further comment on the  
matter.