[Bf-docboard] Re: Let's start again...

[Craig Sanders]

Good point. I haven't used LaTex before, although I know it has been around
for a long time. Until the advent of PageMaker, it was really the only
viable typesetting tool to be had. I will take a look and see.

Thanks for the headsup!!

Craig

-----Original Message-----
From: bf-docboard-admin@blender.org
[mailto:bf-docboard-admin@blender.org]On Behalf Of Christian Plessl
Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2004 10:01 AM
To: bf-docboard@blender.org
Subject: Re: [Bf-docboard] Re: Let's start again...


Craig Sanders wrote:
> DocBook is a good protocol - however as I'm sure you have noticed, there
is
> distinct lack of tools for using it. Most authors working with DocBook are
> still hacking it directly using either vi or emacs. Works, but slow, slow,
> and then slow, plus limited formatting capability.
 > [....]
> Hence, my recommendation is to bite the bullet now and make the conversion
> to a tool that is available on all three major platforms (UNIX, Windows
and
> Mac), can accept raw data from HTML, Word and many other major word
> processors, can output in print (postscript if necessary), PDF and online
> (HTML and PDF) formats, and is capable of working with very long
documents.
> Namely, FrameMaker.

It might be that the lack of sophisticated tools and the deficits in
layout control for Docbook has limited the number of contributors so
far. So your suggestion to use some more sophisticated tool like
Framemaker may make sense.

I don't intend to start a rant about tools, but before changing to some
propriatery sofware solution I suggest to consider cross platform
open-source alternatives.

An alternative to Framemaker would be to use LaTeX. LaTeX is available
for almost any computing platform and has been around for decades. The
major advantages of LaTeX are: It's a plain text format, open-source,
front ends are available and the basic syntax is easy. Cross-referencing
and index generation is done easily. Detailed layout control is possible
but more complex. LaTeX can be used to generate PS,PDF and HTML.

Regards,
  Christian

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