Roberto, that APTconvert tool looks pretty cool. It may be a good idea to explore it some more.
Even still, I think we should standardize on Docbook. It can be a pain to start using at first, but once the developer gets used to it is actually quite nice. I know for one of our projects the documentation writer was hesitant at first but by the end he was raving about the combination of Emacs and Docbook for writing a fairly large technical document.
The other day, I got my first taste of Docbook and at first would have agreed with you. I tried doing it by hand, and it was ridiculous. But after some searching, I found some good products and tools, like:
- jEdit This is a GPL XML editor that is built in Java and totally cross platform. It needs a fairly heavy duty processor (I'm running on a G4 400 and it was a wee bit slow) but it works really nicely. Tag autocompletion, XML tree views, etc. It's a really nice editor. And there are many, many plugins so it has a vibrant community.
- For OS X: Project Omega has a nice article about using Docbook on OS X. They also released a Docbook-X, a suite of tools to converting Docbook XML to HTML or PDF.
- For Windows: I haven't used e-notative Docbook Environment (eDE) for Windows because I'm not on a Win box, but they seem pretty comprehensive and I passed them on to a client. I used W2XML to convert a large Word doc to Docbook, and it worked nicely. But it created some really weird and dirty XML, as one might expect, that I had to go through by hand and clean up so that it could be managed and debugged easier.
- For Linux: I haven't researched this because I haven't needed to, but this Docbook wiki has a fairly comprehensive list of Docbook tools for all platforms.
I think that using jEdit plus some command line XSLT transforms is a good suggestion for documentation writers. It may be a bit painful at first, but ultimately I think we would be happier with the result.
talli
