[work] [Qgis-community-team] documentation format

[Stephan Holl]

Hi,

Am Montag, 5. Mai 2008 02:20:53 schrieb Tara Athan:
> Hello, all! In a moment of madness, I agreed to lead the QGIS
> documentation team. Currently, the documentation is developed in latex
> and then exported to html and pdf formats. I see a few problems with this:
> 1. documentation contributors have to learn latex or someone has to be
> the middle-man to convert their contributions to latex
> 2. latex mixes presentation and structural markup- recommended practice
> is to separate them
> 3. I haven't used latex in over 20 years.
> So I would like to propose that we change to a different format
> (understanding full well and accepting the responsibility for converting
> from the old format to the new)
>
> In this reference
>
> <http://en.tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-Release-Practice-HOWTO/documentation.htm
>l> Docbook is recommended. After a quick perusal of some introductory
> material, such as
>   <http://docbook.org/tdg/en/html/ch01.html>
> it is looking like a good choice to me.
> There is an application for converting from laTex to DocBook
>    <http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~gurari/TeX4ht/>
>
> I would like to know if anyone on the team has experience in using this
> format and can offer advice as to whether this would  be a good idea.

I have worked with latex for documentation for several year now and I think 
that it is worth learning it!

From my point of view we should use our time to complete the docs in latex and 
not waste time in converting from on to another format.

I can offer a hand to fix some latex-issues if needed since I am quite 
familiar with the latex-code used in the docs.

just my 0,02¢

Best regards

	Stephan Holl


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