On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 01:02, Darrell Anderson <humanreadable@...> wrote: > I'll reply to several posts here. > > I referenced Word and FrameMaker only to illustrate the concept of "master documents." That is, merging multiple documents into one, basically by linking all documents into one and formatted with a master style sheet. My apologies for not explaining that I did not mean or intend we use them. :) As a tech writer I'm familiar with both but never would suggest such software for our project. > > Both LibreOffice Writer and KWord support ODT, which fundamentally is XML. Exporting to PDF is straightforward with both. Actually, I just remembered (doh!) that TDE (KDE) natively supports printing to PDF through the KPrinter engine. > > Word processors do provide binary blobs but is that a Bad Thing? We are discussing user guides, not forms of documentation that tend to change in real-time. Our user guides will be relatively static. We won't need version control. > > One advantage about word processors is a low learning curve for people who want to help and participate. The traditional down side is HTML output is horrible. One would think with ODT, being based on XML, that HTML outputs would be a snap but that is not the case. Perhaps that has changed in the last year or so. I'll have to experiment a little. > > There likely is a way to apply XSLT transforms to the underlying XML created in ODT. XSLT is what people in tech writing shops use when they use Docbook. The big challenge is creating an XSLT transform that provides a desired format. Not easy. > > Since TDE natively supports printing to PDF, perhaps we should focus on appropriate solutions to support HTML. Perhaps somebody can write a cleanup script of sorts so the XML to HTML conversion validates correctly. With that we could use Writer or KWord. Does KWord support something similar to the "master document" concept? > > People producing many of the popular distros all have pretty nice HTML documentation. What tools are those folks using to produce their HTML user guides? uh... SuSE uses NovDoc DTD, which is an enhanced version of DocBook DTD. IIRC many other distributions do the exact same thing. Fedora, for example, uses Publican, which is also an enhanced version of DocBook DTD. (PS. I've just discovered that BerliOS isn't going to shut down after all. w00t!) -- later daze. :: Robert Xu :: rxu.lincomlinux.org :: protocol.by/rxu