Re: Suggestions for Organization's documents
moseley@hank.org writes:
> I work with a very small non-profit and over the years they have
> been keeping documents in various formats.... 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.
Aah, the document format question...
> 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.
(But, HTML-to-anything converters are rare, though you could do
something exciting with XSLT.)
> 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 think I'd suggest going with LaTeX for this, since the format is
closest to straight-up text. If you need something arcane, you can
have a guru write a macro package for it and just tell your writers,
"use \strangecommand and don't worry about how it works". The preview
cycle is pretty straightforward (latex; xdvi). HeVeA seems to be the
best LaTeX-to-HTML converter out there, but depends on an OCaml
runtime, so installing it on arbitrary (non-Debian) machines might be
a little tricky.
(Our document scheme at work, for example, is latex (mpost|bibtex),
dvips, ps2pdf, hevea to get HTML, and then uses the Perl
HTML::FormatText module to produce plain text.)
<para>DocBook seems like a good idea in principle, until you realize
that you wind up writing <emphasis>lots</emphasis> of XML start and
close tags. You might go with the SGML version of DocBook, and then
use something like <command/osx/ from the <literal/openjade/ package
to convert to XML so you get to use the XML toolchain.</para>
The XML conversion tools all seem to be fairly young, but generating
PDF and HTML are both straightforward. There seem to be at least two
complete sets of XSL tools out there, the Java tools and the non-Java
tools; the Java ones should be portable to anything with a JVM,
including Windows. But then you can write, with arbitrary
customization,
SGML -[osx]-> XML -[xsltproc]-> XSL:FO -[passivetex]-> PDF
SGML -[osx]-> XML -[ xalan ]-> XSL:FO -[ fop ]-> PDF
SGML -[osx]-> XML -[xsltproc]-> XHTML
SGML -[osx]-> XML -[ xalan ]-> XHTML
The downside is that, since XSLT is Turing-complete, you get to learn
a brand new language complete with fun XML syntax to do anything. The
upside is, it's at least supported by the W3C, and it's trendy, so if
you look on http://www.w3.org/ you can find links to several
tutorials.
(The closest parallel of this toolchain to the LaTeX toolchain is if
you think of LaTeX as having two parts, a macro processor and a
formatter. Then XSL Flow Objects are kind of like the preprocessed
TeX file with some extra layout information; the formatter [passivetex
or FOP] does final layout and generally produces PDF as its actual
output.)
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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