On Wednesday 08 October 2003 18:14, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.kjetil.kjernsmo.net/ OpenPGP KeyID: 6A6A0BBC -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
