[FM Discuss] Adding LaTeX to FlossManuals.net for polishing/ layout

[adam hyde]

On Sun, 2009-09-20 at 20:27 +1200, Douglas Bagnall wrote:
> Mani A wrote:
> 
> > My suggestion would be to do all markup in Latex or context and then
> > convert to other formats.
> 
> 
> It is plain to all technically minded people that we should be using
> semantic mark-up, so variations of your suggestion are frequent.
> 
> What we miss in this reasoning is that there are several hundred open
> source documentation initiatives, and FLOSS Manuals is the *one* that
> decided to concentrate on ease of authorship and a culture of
> participation over structure and processability.  Despite this, it is
> doing OK.  If crappy presentational markup was such a hindrance, we
> wouldn't even be on this list to complain about it -- the dozens of
> books by hundreds of authors are inseparable from the awful html.

When I get asked this question (and it happens often) I always just
point out that we have a large contributor base, a lot of content, we
can produce books in 2-5 days, and we can produce beautiful book
formatted PDF in 2-3 minutes. Its easy to do all this from both the
developers and users perspective. Why would we want to change strategy
and make it harder for everyone?

adam

 



> 
> Regarding the question of html to *TeX conversion: I am unconvinced that
> this is worthwhile.  Automatic conversion to anything is going to be
> hard work, so we might as well convert to something that truly is a hub
> format, like docbook, rather than repeating the same task several times
> over.
> 
> Douglas
> 
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-- 
Adam Hyde
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