Re: Suggestions for Organization's documents
On Wednesday 08 October 2003 18:14, 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.
That's definately a good idea!
Text-based probably a good choice, but also keep in mind that stuff like
character encodings can make lives miserable over time. If you mainly
do a-z, that's perhaps so much of an issue.
> 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.
Yup, HTML is quite likely to be a good choice. Last time I looked, XHTML
2.0 are about to correct many of the bad flaws of previous HTML
versions. It's worth looking at the latest draft spec.
> 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.
Yup.
> 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?
XSLT is there only to transform things. DocBook is very nice, but may be
overkill.
I've used LaTeX extensively, a lot of letters, some articles and a 150
page thesis. The output it produces if not used wrong, is of excellent
quality. If it is important to you that your printed documents are of
excellent typographic quality (as opposed to documents looking
professional to a non-professional, like M$ Word), choose LaTeX. There
are fewer tools for LaTeX though.
However, I suspect it is more important that you have the flexibility of
mainly online publishing as well as a good authoring tool.
Then, I would think as follows:
1) Minimalist: Choose HTML. If it can't be done with HTML, too bad. You
could concievably write CSS to produce booklets from HTML source.
2) Feature-rich: OpenOffice. There are XSLT transforms to transform
OOo-files to HTML that are excellent, and if you would ever consider
using something like AxKit for your website, you can simply drop the
OOo file on the webserver and have it served like any other file using
an "OpenOffice Provider",
http://search.cpan.org/~msergeant/Apache-AxKit-Provider-OpenOffice-1.02/
Best,
Kjetil
--
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Astrophysicist/IT Consultant/Skeptic/Ski-orienteer/Orienteer/Mountaineer
kjetil@kjernsmo.net webmaster@skepsis.no editor@learn-orienteering.org
Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/ OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC
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