Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Manuals Module for OpenACS V3

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Posted by Roberto Mello on
Talli,

Your thinking is great, but wouldn't a documentation template do that for us? Plus, there's the issue of exporting the document to different formats (if done in HTML, HTMLDOC does a nice job of generating PDFs).

I agree that writing in DocBook can be daunting, but at least in Debian, getting the tools to work right was not very hard. One apt-get and that was it. Okay, maybe 2 (I installed psgml for Emacs).

The only other thing I had to do was to glance through the LDP-Author-Guide-HOWTO and find their stylesheet, and use it. Following their instructions wasn't hard.

Then psgml does the rest of the job much easier. The cool thing about using DocBook (that I know of) is that it generates the indices, links, and is exportable to different formats through Jade.

Another option that can help is using LyX. It'll generate DocBook. I wrote the initial OpenACS docs using LyX and it served me quite well. I later switched to Emacs+psgml for the added flexibility.

What we have to get here is people that are willing to mess with the system/whatever and write about it.