> On 17 November 2011 11:58, Kristopher John Gamrat > <chaotickjg@...>wrote: > >> On Thursday 17 November 2011 11:50:12 am Calvin Morrison wrote: >> > Do you want a new inexperienced user writing your help manual? >> >> I was contributing to documentation over at Ark Linux within a month >> after >> I >> started. It wasn't much, and most of it was adding details to existing >> documentation, but I did contribute. That's what most inexperienced >> users >> will do if they do contribute: add in details. That's quite useful to >> have: >> since most of us have been doing awhile, it's hard for us to write from >> a >> newbie perspective, so we might leave out important details or not be >> clear. >> A new user who's reading that might get just enough detail to figure it >> out >> on their own and want to help improve the article. >> >> > I'll respond to both here. > > If users are sending in data and we are going to reformat it, it doesn't > matter if we use markdown or not. > > Again if this is going to be very collaborative as Piki suggests, we might > as well employ the wiki we already have in place. > > Calvin Morrison > Overruled. :-) The consensus here (which I agree with) is that no markup languages are needed or desired. This documentation could potentially grow to the size of a small book--can you seriously even imagine trying to edit that for clarity, let along grammatical errors, without a word processor? There is a right tool for the job, along with a bunch of wrong, but workable, tools. Let's use the right one! We will use the flat ODT format in GIT. I will work on getting automatic builds both to "real" document formats (PDF, PostScript) and to HTML. Help is welcome here; basically I just need the command line to pass to LibreOffice to make it spit out such documents, especially on the HTML end. Tim