On Wed, 2003-10-08 at 11:14, [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. > > 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. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jefferson, LA USA "I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals, I'm a vegetarian because I hate vegetables!" unknown -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
