Re: HTML documentation system - design and planning

Although you are focusing on Perl, I would suggest LaTeX: A Documentation Preparation System. It's a bit obscure, but widely used in academic circles.

The basic concept is a markup language like turbocharged HTML, but it also includes easily organized documents with sections, subsections, indexes, and tables-of-contents.

Although there is a learning curve, I've found that I do almost all of my technical documentation in LaTeX and it's been for me by far the most efficient way to do it. I've had some peers scoff at the concept because they've never heard of it or used it or have heard it's difficult to learn (not more than HTML in my experience), but I've also known other people who use it for the same thing I do, and they absolutely swear by it as well.

It also supports easy export to HTML (latex2html, written in Perl), PDF (pdflatex), PostScript (dvips), and other formats, and produces the most visually consistent and readable documents of any documentation system I know.

If you are using GNU/Linux, you can find the tetex (the Linux version of LaTeX) RPMs at http://www.rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=tetex.

They also come on the Red Hat installation CDs.

If you decide to investigate it and have any questions, send me an e-mail. I'd be happy to give you some pointers to get you started.

Hope this helps :-)

Comment on Re: HTML documentation system - design and planning

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Re (tilly) 2: HTML documentation system - design and planning by tilly (Archbishop) on Sep 08, 2001 at 20:08 UTC
For people who just want to try it and get a sense of how well it works, I suggest trying to write a document with LyX.	[reply]
Re: Re: HTML documentation system - design and planning by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Sep 09, 2001 at 06:19 UTC
Actually, I've used (regular) T_EX for documentation long ago. I'm aware at how powerful a separate formatting pass, as opposed to WYSIWYG, can be. The obverse side of WYSIWYG is What You See Is All You Got. I got a LaTeX book once, but didn't care for it. Once upon a time, I decided I'd rather have copious documentation rather than beautiful documentation, and used Word for the project. It's just so much easier to create and edit, esp. if inserting illustrations and such.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: HTML documentation system - design and planning by Hanamaki (Chaplain) on Sep 09, 2001 at 18:33 UTC
Once upon a time, I decided I'd rather have copious documentation rather than beautiful documentation, and used Word for the project. It's just so much easier to create and edit, esp. if inserting illustrations and such. So maybe you should investigate tilly's hint on LyX further. With LyX you get some WYSIWYG and the power of LaTeX. Together with Ghostscript (ps2pdf), pdfTeX, html2latex, latex2html and latex2rtf you will get a powerfull typsetting environment which isn't that difficult to learn. But it is still TeX, meaning a typsetting language. I would rather use XML or some other logical markup and then convert it to LaTeX or whatever for typsetting on paper, as pdf or to produce rtf documents. Hanamaki	[reply]


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