Re: Documentation File Formats

[Georg Lehner]

Hello!

El vie, 23-08-2002 a las 10:49, Peter Sullivan escribió:
> On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 05:02:58AM -0700, J. Childers wrote:
> > Now that it's out, what do you guys think about standardizing 
> > documentation in OpenOffice file formats? 

I do not think, that OpenOffice is a "GNU bad thing", as stated earlier 
in this thread. In the contrary: it is beeing packaged for Debian, you
can download the source and compile and redistribute it yourself, etc.
don't nail me down about legalises however, I don't know.

However, I agree, that DocBook aproaches have the advantage of beeing
more capable for colaborative efforts, diff's, merges,  Version Control
etc. scales better for them.
...
> Open Office has been seriously considered, especially since it should 
> be theoretically possible (since Docbook is just another XML format) 
> to get Open Office to save in Docbook format - although no-one seems 
> too convinced about this. 

Are there Stylesheets for OpenOffice? Can you point me to them?

...

> and/or if there were any decent "WYSIWYG" editors for Docbook we 
> were not aware of. However, given the pressures on Derek's time 
> at an event like this, I'm not sure what (if anything) happened on
> this?
> 
> ("WYSIWYG" in quotes, as technically WYSIWYG for a non-visual 
> format like Docbook is an oxymoron, but y'all know what I mean.)  
...

There is a new genre of WYS* around since a while which is called
WYSIWYM, and I think was perceived and coined by LyX
(http://www.lyx.org).

What you see is what you mean brings visual editing and structured
documents together.
LyX has LinuxDoc, hence SGML support since a while, and it should be
able to extend or modify this to DocBook, at least to a reasonable
subset.

I use LyX for almost any tecnical writing - it is a document Workbench
which allows you to preview and export to dvi, ps, pdf, pdflatex, html,
latex, plain ascii, and even to user definable formats from any of the
above. It can be used in makefiles: lyx --export pdf <filename.lyx>
creates the .pdf file out of the LyX file, without using the grafical
interface.

It is possible, albeit not trivial to install LyX on Windows.

Best Regards,

        Jorge-León