Re: Making It Easy For New Authors (was Re: Style Guide)

[David Lawyer <dave@lafn.org>]

> 
> Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc@cu-portland.edu> writes:
> 
>  > David, just as strongly as you urge use of LinuxDoc, I urge
>  > acceptance of DocBook.  I'll make some comments below.

On Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 02:34:27PM -0400, Harvey J. Stein wrote:
> IMHO, this is exactly the sort of thing to be avoided.  It's fine to
> have a preferred format (or formats).  But I think the "acceptable"
> formats list should be *much* larger, and should include plain text.

The trouble is that if a distribution includes the only the html
version, then people who get that would miss out on HOWTOs which are
only in plain text.  Thus if we accept plain text it should be
provisional acceptance with the intention of converting it to sgml
(either LinuxDoc or DocBook).  One can try that now and hope that
someone will promtly do the conversion

> <snip>
> 
> I personally had lots of headaches with this.  I spent time learning
> linuxdoc & using it to mark up my howto, only to find that a) Linuxdoc
> was much too weak for my purposes, b) the tools were buggy, hard to
> install, and in constant need of updating.  I ended up spending a vast
> amount of time on stupid markup issues & doing dumb tweaks to make
> sure that rendering in the different formats was acceptable.

I used LinuxDoc (although I thought I was using "sgml" since that's
what it was erroneously called) and had only a few minor problems.  A number
(most?) of the bugs have been fixed by the current maintainer,
Taketoshi Sano.

			David Lawyer


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