[was what writing tools do you use]

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2007-11-14 at 21:17 +1000, Murray McAllister wrote:
> Just following up on the survey. I noticed a few people using
> OpenOffice - is this because there are some magical XML tools for it?
> Just curious, as I've never used Open Office, or considered it, for
> Docbook.
> 
> Thanks for the help.

OpenOffice.org saves its own files in an XML format (inside a ZIP
archive named with a ".od?" extension).  OO.o also has XSLT available to
save documents as DocBook, but the template is rather limited, and there
is no style package to help the user stick with styles that will
translate well through the XSLT.  In general, you can do OK if you stick
only with Heading[123], Body Text, and a couple of the list formats, but
it's not really ready for prime time IMHO.  Being able to use markup
like <command>, <screen>, <package>, <userinput>, <computeroutput>, and
<segmentedlist> are pretty important in our docs.

The fact that these things are missing is just a matter of elbow grease
though.  It's not some miraculous programming feat that's needed, just
some people who are XML/XSLT friendly and have time to come up with the
appropriate transformations.  If I'd had the time, I guess I'd have
worked on this already, but my XSLT tends to be a *lot* of trial and
error.  (And error. And error....)

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
           Fedora Project: http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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