[drupal-docs] Re: [drupal-devel] Re: [drupal.org] LaTeX content

[Charlie Lowe]

Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
> 
>> There's a certain amount of interest in using
>>DocBook XML as a native format for Drupal Documentation, so perhaps
>>there will be some overlap with this project, if it gets off of the
>>ground.
> 
> 
> I doubt that. There has been talk about that for at least two years.
> 

How does the saying go? Code is golden, talk is cheap?

This is why for those two years, I keep volunteering to produce a 
publishable version of the handbook for releases (sans an index) using 
OpenOffice and then throw out a rough version as a demo generated in 
about 20 minutes. Wouldn't be that hard to produce something like the 
following *if* we can get some more consistent styling within the text:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/pdf/rhl-rg-en-9.pdf

Redhat's reference guide is *easily* done in OO. All we need is an HTML 
style guide for the handbook which facilitates this. Once I've done made 
one once and setup the styling on the OO end, it wouldn't take me more 
than a half hour at each release. And here's a better example. My 
students created Drupal documentation in a Drupal collab book last 
semester where we paid careful attention to formatting. Then pullled it 
all together in OO during the last week of class:

http://osddp.org/files/issues/drupal_end_user_manual.pdf

I tend to think stylistically it looks pretty good since none of them 
had any experience with publishing (mostly engineer and science 
undergraduate majors).

Or, on the other hand, I would suggest that we take Djun Kim up on his 
method of automatically generating a pdf version since proof of concept 
is already there. Or if Boris, etc., sets up a Drupal document 
construction wiki using DocWiki. Or we can continue to go with no 
solution other than wishful thinking about how DocBook would be nice 
with visions of some elaborately formatted text. We are creating 
reference guides people, not magazine layouts.

Charlie