Re: [OT] Project documentation

From: Wendy S (wendywds_at_hotmail.net)
Date: 02/21/05 

Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 20:40:20 -0700

"Ryan Stewart" <zzanNOtozz@gSPAMo.com> wrote

> Sad to see you haven't received any replies to this. I'd like to see some
> feedback on this matter too, especially as it relates to web applications.

I have a feeling I am not alone in the lack-of-documentation area! My
requirements are to produce PDF and HTML output from a single source, handle
the fancy numbered chapter/section/subsections, and do both table of
contents and an index. Oh, and to be something new and fun to play with. ;)

I found DocBook. I've heard of it before, but I had never used it. It's an
XML format, and there are XSL stylesheets to transform the XML into pretty
much anything.

I put together a page of resources and examples as I was working on the
XML-to-PDF part:
     http://wiki.wendysmoak.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?DocBookToPDF

To get from XML to PDF takes two steps, first you go from .xml to .fo with
XSLT, then from .fo to .pdf with Apache FOP. The stylesheets are still
Greek to me, and I don't have a clue how FOP works, but thankfully there are
Ant tasks for everything and you just have to point them at the right files.
Once that works, transforming to HTML is trivial, you just use a different
style***.

This, I suspect, is the easy part. Now I have to figure out what to put
_in_ the documentation. ;) 

-- 
Wendy
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