[Bf-docboard] About MediaWiki and DocBook

[Martin Middleton]

  Personally, I have nothing against MediaWiki. And I think the work that has been done on the Blender manual there is great.

I agree with David. I still feel that DocBook is the way to go. There are so many toolsets available (for nearly every platform) that conversion from DocBook to HTML or PDF (or other formats) is pretty trivial.

I currently convert the Blender Manual to PDF, HTML, and HTML help (Windows Help file). I'll get them published on my website, so people can download them, or examine them. Currently, I do very little special formatting, but if the issue is the current look of the output, then time could be spent to come up with a better-designed format.

I agree that there is a learning curve to writing DocBook, but today there are tools which will let you write structured text (very similar to MediaWiki) and convert it to DocBook. So now you can write DocBook without having to know DocBook. Or alternately, there are free XML editors that will let you do the same thing. 

Just my $0.02.