[CF List] spell summary

[Joris Bontje]

On Sat, Aug 17, 2002 at 12:47:13AM -0700, Mark Wedel wrote:
>
     
      Juan Segarra wrote:
     
     >
     
      > [I made spell docs in latex]
     
     >
     
     
     >
     
      [I am wary with Latex, HTML would be better.]
     
     
For another opensource project (IIP) we have had a lot of trouble with
the documentation.
We tried various systems.
- HTML, good for webpublishing, bad for typesetting. Since layout and
  content are mixed, hard to maintain.
- LaTeX great for typesetting, bad for the web (unless you like the
  latex2html output or pdf files)
- Docbook. nice, xml, very complex, hard to learn.

Some tool to convert HTML to PDF/PS is 'htmldoc'.
     
     http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/
     
     
windows and unix versions available, opensource.
Very easy to use.
Drawback is that you dont get the layout that you want, hard to tweak,
CSS is ignored etc.

What we have now is a very simple layout-light html file. Editing it with a WYSIWYG
editor is forbidden, they tend to ruin your files. Put it through
htmltidy each time you edit it to check that you dont have errors etc.

If you go for HTML, use as less layout as possible, be very strict with
your code. Use CSS so you dont have to put layout things in the text.
Do you *need* PDF output? Are you sure that you want to print it?
If not, try to have as less output formats as possible.

Joris Bontje / mids
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