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Re: Formats for cross-platform documentation?

Subject: Re: Formats for cross-platform documentation?
From: dmbrown -at- brown-inc -dot- com
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 00:52:57 -0700


Joel Konkle-Parker wrote:

Microsoft Word documents can be written and read (through OpenOffice), so that's an option, but it seems inflexible.

PDFs are out, I don't have an easy way to create them (I'm on an SGI).

You can create Word documents, but not PDFs? There are lots of ways to create PDFs.


I've heard about formats that are specifically created for this sort of thing (troff, DocBook, what are those?), but I don't know anything about them.

Neither troff nor DocBook is a format in the sense I think you mean.

troff is a mark-up language. If you ever used WordStar in the DOS and pre-DOS days, you'll feel right at home with troff. troff is also the program that processes a marked up file to create output that can be further processed into PostScript, which in turn is sent to your printer.

DocBook is a DTD (a set of content type definitions) for use with SGML. The content types defined in DocBook are supposedly optimized for technical writing. DocBook defines the elements within a document.

If I were you, I'd stick with HTML, or reexamine creating PDFs from Word (or Framemaker, if it's available, too.)

--David

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Formats for cross-platform documentation?: From: Joel Konkle-Parker

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