> 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