Re: Suggestions for Organization's documents
On Wed, 8 Oct 2003 moseley@hank.org wrote:
> I work with a very small non-profit and over the years they have been
> keeping documents in various formats (most often MS Word or
> WordPerfect). From these documents they generate printed booklets (so
> postscript output good), and the documents are also available on-line in
> HTML (to fit their existing web site) and as PDF.
>
> I'd like to move to text-based documents so we are not dependent on a
> specific product (like Word). So I'm looking for suggestions.
>
> The people that create and manage these documents come and go (twice a
> year people change at the organization). So I'm looking for something
> with an easy learning curve. HTML is an options because everyone these
> days seems to have a bit of HTML experience. The other advantage of
> HTML is that people can typically view them on their local machine.
>
> MS Word is nice that most seem to have it and it has reasonably good
> formatting (for wrapping text around images and so on) but the
> translation to HTML is horrible -- it won't generate HTML that they can
> use directly with their web site (which use style sheets and a
> templating system). Not to mention it's not an Open Source solution.
>
> So, I'm looking for something where the documents are easily edited,
> there's *not much of a learning curve* for editing the text, and tools
> exist for multiple platforms for generating ps or pdf output for preview
> locally. And easy translation to HTML to fit our site. XSLT?? DocBook?
> LaTeX?
>
I don't have any experience with DocBook or XSLT, but I do nearly
everything in LaTeX and I love it. From LaTex source you can pretty much
automatically generate html and pdf as well as postscript. I do think the
learning curve is a little steep though. The way I do it is a lot like
developing software, I have a directory that I put the "source" .tex files
and have written a Makefile to "compile" it. I edit the source files with
an editor and then run make and out come my docs. Many, many people here
really like how my docs look, but are astounded that I can't give them a
Word file and positively cringe when I break out emacs to do the edits.
With LaTeX I find that I worry a lot more about the content of the
document than the format of it. If you need some pretty fancy document
layouts, LaTeX can be a little challenging, but if your documents fit one
of the standard document classes then its pretty good. LaTeX would
probably only work for you if you had some guru type person who set up
templates that the other people could use so they didn't have to become
too knowledgeable about LaTeX.
Another option might be OpenOffice. Essentially its Word without the
proprietary-ness of Word.
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