Re: End of Documentation Discussion
>I would suggest either of the following:
> * DVI format. It can be converted to HTML (I think...) and plain
> text on-the-fly.
The conversions of DVI->HTML and DVI->Text produce results that range
from poor to completely unusable.
> * LinuxDoc/SGML. This is probably the best choice. It converts to
> HTML very nicely. It can also be converted to PostScript (via
> LaTeX tools) and so a nice printed output can be obtained. It
> can also be converted to ASCII text, and so can be searched
> without too much difficulty (but would be better if it was
> natively searchable). LinuxDoc also has the advantage that
> there is a powerful psuedo-WYSIWYG editor (LyX) that can generate
> LinuxDoc output. LinuxDoc tools are not so huge as TeX and so
> a system that does not need to bother with PostScript files
> would not need to install a large system.
A good format, but the problem here is that the LinuxDoc/SGML source
isn't very useful by itself, it has to be converted to another source
to be useful.
Basic fact of the matter is that we don't have a perfect solution, all
of them have problems. But I'd say of the available options HTML at
least provides:
1. A wide variety of browsers (although as discussed many times, none
with quite the desired feature base).
2. A wide variety of possible formats that can result in HTML.
On the issue of the difficulty of doing good searches on html... Since
we plan on distributing as much documentation as possible in html
format, can't we simply configure 'glimpse' to provide much of this
missing functionality?
--
Richard W Kaszeta Graduate Student/Sysadmin
bofh@bofh.me.umn.edu University of MN, ME Dept
http://www.menet.umn.edu/~kaszeta
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