[oclug] Open Source Oppositions Get Serious

[Dave O'Neill]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2002 at 02:40:50AM +0100, Kevin McLauchlan wrote:

> So, since you guys are just going to DocBook, what tools have you chosen
> for the various stages of the document-production path?

Well, our tech writer is using the latest version of FrameMaker for our
released docs (install guide, admin guide, user manual), which can
apparantly handle DocBook well enough for his liking.   We developers are
using vim and emacs to maintain the developer docs.    To generate output,
we're using make and docbook2pdf with a custom DSSSL stylesheet.  We started
off using Formatting Objects (with xsltproc and fop), but ran in to some
problems.  DSSSL ended up being good enough for our purposes.

> Y'know, OpenOffice is actually about  ->|  |<-  this close to being a
> contender against FrameMaker. From my perspective, they need only to make
> the commitment that every last text-affecting operation you can perform
> should be fully do-able via Styles.  Right now, it looks just so good, and
> I get just so far... and then I find a key operation that I have to
> perform as Toolbar override, and that has no equivalent among the Style
> options.

It would be nice if you could not only do every text-formatting operation
via styles, but have an option that wouldn't let you do it any other way, so
as to keep formatting and content completely separate.  

I recall Chris H saying something about the next release of OOo having
some level of DocBook authoring support, but I'll have to check the archives
to see what was said.  

-dave0
-- 
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