Re: Suggestions for Organization's documents
On Wed, 2003-10-08 at 11:14, 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.
>
> 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?
The problem with using HTML is this case is that html was not designed
with this in mind.
A desktop publishing solution (kword & scribus come to mind) is the
best solution, and since they are OSS, the data files aren't locked.
Still, I'd go with OpenOffice 1.1, because:
- it's most like Word (minimizes training)
- is cross-platform
- can export as PDF
- the data file is zipped XML text, and thus can be parsed by Perl,
Python, Mozilla(?), etc.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. ron.l.johnson@cox.net
Jefferson, LA USA
"I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals, I'm a vegetarian
because I hate vegetables!"
unknown
Reply to: