[OSGeo-Edu] Our proposed educational content andmanagement standard!

[Landon Blake]

Ned,

You've pointed out one huge limitation of Scribus: It's really designed
for a single output format, which is PDF. This definitely limits its
usefulness for a lot of documentation tasks.

Ned wrote: The best open source WYSIWYG DocBook tools that I'm aware of
are limited to Linux but I didn't look too hard after I stared using
XMLMind.

I'll take a look at XMLMind. 

Ned wrote: Some limitations I ran 
into with Scribus were that it didn't support HTML output, table support

was minimal and it was difficult to readjust the document every time I 
wanted to update it. I also expect translation would be difficult.

This is something I ran into when working on documentation for OpenJUMP,
which is used in several languages. It is an excellent point and I'm
glad you brought it up. One solution I found to the layout & translation
problem was to keep graphics and text in separate pages of the document
being produced. I'm not sure how that would translate to Docbook, but it
is something to think about.

Ned wrote: A number of people are using DocBook for 
publishing books. One of the best know is O'Reilly.

I'd like to learn more about this use of Docbook. I'll have to Google it
this week.

Landon


-----Original Message-----
From: Ned Horning [mailto:nedh at lightlink.com] 
Sent: Monday, January 21, 2008 9:56 AM
To: Landon Blake
Cc: cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu; smailiidaho at yahoo.com; OSGeo-edu
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Edu] Our proposed educational content andmanagement
standard!

Landon,

Good comments. Some of my thoughts below.

Landon Blake wrote:
> As long as there is an inexpensive (preferably FOSS), easy-to-use, and
> preferably cross-platform tool available. I'm not saying everyone has
to
> use this, but the availability of such a tool for authors should be
> available.
>   
The best open source WYSIWYG DocBook tools that I'm aware of are limited

to Linux but I didn't look too hard after I stared using XMLMind. There 
could be other good stuff out there. Some people don't like writing XML 
using WYSIWYG editors and for those folks there are a lot of options on 
all platforms.
> As an example, I'd really love to see a PDF version of the Free GIS
Book
> at some point in the future, and even a hard copy version of the book
> that could be purchased from Lulu or something similar. I don't think
> you'll find a FOSS tool that will beat Scribus for something like
> textbook layout.
>   
Actually I think DocBook would be ideal for this. Some limitations I ran

into with Scribus were that it didn't support HTML output, table support

was minimal and it was difficult to readjust the document every time I 
wanted to update it. I also expect translation would be difficult. I 
expect DocBook will be much easier to deal with as far as revisions and 
language translation go. A number of people are using DocBook for 
publishing books. One of the best know is O'Reilly.
> I think it is important to avoid making a specification for
> documentation to great an obstacle for new authors. As an example, I
had
> to learn some LaTex to work on the OSGeo journal. This wasn't a great
> challenge, but I'm guessing some authors would decide it wasn't worth
> the hassle to contribute.
>   
This cannot be overstressed. I think, above all, we need to encourage 
people to contribute content. If we do agree on a "standard" and some 
people want to use something else we should try to figure out how best 
to deal with that. We can also build resources to help newcomers get up 
to speed. There are some good DocBook related support materials 
available from a number of large software projects (Ubuntu [1], 
GNOME[2], KDE[3]).
> I hope I'm not being a real pain in the rear-end. 
>   
You're not a pain in the rear-end. The more input we get the better.

[1] http://doc.ubuntu.com/
[2] http://library.gnome.org/devel/gdp-style-guide/stable/
[3] http://l10n.kde.org/docs//styleguide/index.html


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