Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 14:32:47 +0200 (MET DST) From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Cc: doc@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD Documenters) Subject: Re: Linuxdoc Message-ID: <199606061232.OAA02995@allegro.lemis.de> In-Reply-To: <7005.833939907@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Jun 4, 96 06:58:27 pm
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Jordan K. Hubbard writes: > > The choice of SGML itself seems to be a non-issue. Everyone from Sun > to HP to DEC (I live with a tech writer who's a docs project manager > for Sun and worked everywhere else before that) is moving to SGML and > some DTD, O'Reilly and associates has all of its authors writing in SGML > using their own DTD (which they'll provide to anyone for free, BTW) Well, this was news to me, and I'm one of the ORA authors you mentioned. Lenny Muellner only recently discouraged me from using SGML. I forwarded this message and got this reply: > The statement "O'Reilly and Associates has all of its authors writing in SGML > using their own DTD" is not correct, but it does not imply that we are having > all of our authors write in SGML. Some of our authors--especially the > Linux authors--are very comfortable writing in SGML and have chosen to > provide us their source in it. The DocBook is not "our" DTD--it is the > DTD developed by a consortium of many companies called the Davenport Group and > of which we are one of the founders and sponsors. A very large group > of companies are using it for computer documentation. > > Again, if you want to write your book in SGML, that's fine. It's just that you > are comfortable with troff, you know our macros, and we are set up to convert > what you produce to SGML, so that the process will be faster and easier. > You can concentrate on your content. There's no learning curve for you. > But if you want to take the plunge, go for it. > > Lenny > So we're on the right train, let's not let the color of the upholstery > motivate us into switching back to the more familiar yet outmoded > horse and buggy. :-) There's been so much mail on this subject in the last couple of days that I haven't found time to analyse it, but I think we can say: - Nobody likes TeX or groff that much. - SGML would be a good idea - Linuxdoc is probably a bad choice - We need a documented DTD. What do you say we examine DocBook? Greghelp
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