On Sun, Feb 11, 2007 at 06:11:58AM -0500, cga2000 wrote: > So far my personal doc system amounts to a patchwork of notes and > cheat sheets in ascii files that I grep when I need to find some piece > of information or other. > > I would like to switch to something a little more ambitious where I > would be able to generate my docs in the usual popular formats, namely > pdf, html, ps, txt, and possibly dvi. > > In terms of document structure, my needs are very basic: > > ====================================================================== > This is the main title of my document > 1. Chapter 1. > 1.1 Paragraph 1. > This is a list > 1. list item 1 > 2. list item 2 > blurb blurb blurb blurb blurb blurb blurb .. [snip standard technical report] > > I am not concerned about typesetting .. the only requirement is that the > contents of tables and samples should materialize in a non-proportional > font in order to be legible. > > My only other requirement is that this "documentation system" should not > require the implementation of complex gui tools. I want to do it in vim > and use command line tools to generate the various formats. >
Hi cga, I asked something similar a couple of months ago and the concensus was either LaTex or DocBook. I don't like GUI tools. For years I've been using Lout but it only puts out to text, ps, and pdf. I've finally bitten the bullet and am looking at LaTex. It will do whatever output format you like either with a dvi2* or a tex2* type processor. The documentation is great except that it comes in tex and ps. I suppose one could convert the tex to html and make a system of that. I have also looked at DocBook. It is in transition from SGML to XML. The DocBook-Definitive Guide (docbook-dg) isn't packaged for Etch yet and previous docs only delt with SGML. If one were using a GUI it would probably be a possibility for me, but there's a lot more typing for XML tags than there are in Tex. Tex is also very similar to Lout (or rather, Lout is rather similar to Tex) so that eases my learning curve. I've been looking at this in relation to my NoviceDoc project and I'm leaning toward LaTex. LaTex files can also be converted to DocBook. I know that most of LaTex is focused on typesetting so you could think it is overkill, but to me it is the easiest to implement even to put out html (unless you _only_ want html, then I suppose you could just learn html.) Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
