[MetaCRS] CS-Map documentation

[Justin Deoliveira]

Just to add to Howards voice here I have found Sphinx to be a great tool 
and GeoServer has also decided to move to it for project documentation.

http://gridlock.openplans.org/geoserver/1.7.x/doc/user/

-Justin

Howard Butler wrote:
> Norm,
> 
> I saw you committed a preliminary version of the CS-Map documentation.  
> In your commit message, you lamented 20 years of different people using 
> different tools to maintain the document.  MapServer doesn't have 20 
> years of lineage, but it does have numerous folks editing the 
> documentation all the time, and it has iterated a number of solutions to 
> multi-user documentation efforts.
> 
> I thought I would point out the documentation tool that in my opinion 
> has been a highly successful documentation boon to the MapServer project 
> -- Sphinx.  Sphinx allows us to drive our website's documentation using 
> hierarchical sub-documents that are managed in subversion.  This is 
> similar to the Doxygen approach, but the documents primarily exist 
> *outside* the source code, and the editing of the documentation is done 
> in a plain text-like markup called reStructured Text.  Doxygen or even 
> Docbook's markup, while providing easy diffs and plain text access, 
> makes it quite hard to casually edit things.  I think casual editing is 
> also what most frequently happens when docs go into maintenance mode, 
> and making it very easy to do helps keep the docs actively maintained.
> 
> Additionally, Sphinx supports output formats other than HTML, including 
> PDF and Windows Compiled Help.  MapServer currently only provides HTML 
> and PDF for its website.
> 
> MapServer docs subversion tree -- 
> http://svn.osgeo.org/mapserver/trunk/docs/
> MapServer rendered html docs - http://mapserver.org/docs
> MapServer rendered pdf docs - http://mapserver.org/MapServer.pdf
> 
> http://sphinx.pocoo.org/
> 
> Howard
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> MetaCRS mailing list
> MetaCRS at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/metacrs


-- 
Justin Deoliveira
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Enterprise support for open source geospatial.