[Scons-dev] New SCons doc toolchain...

[Dirk Bächle]

Hi Russel,

thanks a lot for all your comments. I won't go into detail about each 
one of them, but would like to say a few words in general.
There still may be some quirks with fonts or layouts and "fop" is 
certainly not state of the art for PDF rendering...whatever. To be 
honest, I don't care that much...if you do, I'll gladly accept your pull 
requests.
I tried to improve the overall procedure for creating the documents, 
especially for a user that wants to contribute by writing a paragraph or 
two for the manual or the UserGuide.
And I had some success with that, at least it was the best I could give 
and I, personally, am happy with the result.

So there it is now, and can be used by the SCons project. If you guys 
are not convinced or have better ideas, that's good. Let's talk about 
them and if they can support all the current features we need and look 
even prettier, that would be the way to go then.
I'm cool with that...
What I don't want to happen is, that we "do nothing" just because the 
fonts don't look pretty enough yet, or some hyphenations are still wrong.
I'd rather go into a possibly wrong direction first and then correct, 
instead of not moving at all and being stuck with SGML and troff.

Best regards,

Dirk

On 28.04.2013 08:41, Russel Winder wrote:

> [...]

>

> I think human being should never have to read or write XML, not even

> DocBook/XML. XML-based toolchains are clearly now the norm in publishing

> for re-purposing, but should this lead to requiring authors to write

> DocBook/XML?


Yes, in our case I think it should. Because it allows us to validate the 
documents, such that we can put the main work load on the user, not us. ;)


> [...]

>

> Seriously, I do worry that using XML is a sufficient barrier to entry

> that we will not be evolving the content of the documentation just the

> form.


Well, troff is a barrier as well. Wouldn't it help to move away from 
that, as a first step?


> Dirk deserves a prize for taking this on and doing what he has.

>   


If we finally get a little bit of movement about this topic, that'll be 
enough of a prize to me. :)