Developers of Sympa

[Peter Farmer <address@concealed>]

Forgive me if I missed some earlier post that covered this, but no one seems 
to have really touched on docbook (http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBook) 
as the basis of a Sympa technical document style library - which is exactly 
what it is intended for.
In fact there is a a whole subproject at OOo on using OOwriter as  WYSIWYG 
editor for  DocBook XML . The principle is to edit structured documents 
using styles that are then transformed to XML tags on export.

http://xml.openoffice.org/xmerge/docbook/

They provide the relevant XSLT stylesheets for the XML transformations and 
an OpenOffice.org style template that contains custom styles corresponding 
to DocBook tags.

If you'd like to get a feel what it might be like using OO and Docbook have 
a look at the User Guide :

http://xml.openoffice.org/xmerge/docbook/UserGuide.html

I havent used it in anger yet myself, but it seems to me that most of the 
work has been done or is being done for us. Admittedly DocBook might be too 
sophisticated for Sympa Documentation, but there are simplified variants of 
DocBook available. Although OOo uses the full DocBook document type 
declaration, it does not actually export the full list of DocBook elements 
(see http://xml.openoffice.org/xmerge/docbook/DocBookTags.html) and since 
you are not trying to import existing docbook based documentation, 

It uses a simplified DocBook tag set which is geared to on-the-fly 
rendering. The OpenOffice simplified (or "special" docbook) is available 
from http://www.chez.com/ebellot/ooo2sdbk/ (the site is in french).

Some early experiences of the OOo Docbook proof-of-concept phase are here : 
http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/OpenOffice
In general I can whole heartedly endorse OO as a tool for cooperative 
creation of documentation. 
The Linux Documentation Project is created in Docbook format, and some of 
its volunteer writers are using OO.



On Friday 08 September 2006 2:56 am, Bill.Costa@un h.edu wrote:

>
>      With a well thought out set of style components, I'm hoping
>      that creating a consistent, attractive, and easy to use
>      document with OOoWriter will be much easier.  But
>      unfortunately I also haven't had much luck in finding any
>      technical document style sheet libraries.  One way I can
>      think of bootstrapping a style would be to try and find a
>      well organized Open Source technical manual created with
>      OOoWriter and using that as a template.  In any case, here
>      are a few links I found that look like they might prove
>      useful in general:
>      I'll keep looking for resources in this area and let you know
>      if I find anything else of interest.
>