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

[Hal Burgiss <hburgiss@bellsouth.net>]

On Tue, Oct 10, 2000 at 11:09:22AM -0700, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> David, just as strongly as you urge use of LinuxDoc, I urge
> acceptance of DocBook.  I'll make some comments below.

Speaking as someone who not long ago went through a baptism of fire
with SGML, linuxdoc vs docbook, stylesheets, DTDs, etc, and not
knowing much of them to start with, I would strongly agree to settle
on just *one* tool. Obvisouly that would be docbook. And not even
expose newcomers to linuxdoc at all. Leave it out of the LAG
altogether. It's for their own good ;) One less thing to add to an
already confusing situation.

I think it would also be a good idea to have packages available for
download somewhere. One stop shopping. Just knowing which tool did
what, was another confusing thing for me at first. If someone could be
pointed to an ftp site, and told 'you need every package in that dir',
this would be a good thing. I spent much more time hassling with this
than I did writing for at least a week. Frustrating. I started with
linuxdoc, then (wisely!) moved to docbook, but somewhere in the process
something conflicted, and then none of the tools worked. Learning a
bit of SGML was the easiest part. I didn't find the move from linuxdoc
to docbook that bad either. 

-- 
Hal B
 hal@foobox.net
 hal@burgiss.net
 hburgiss@bellsouth.net
--


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