dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Murodullo Latifov <murodlatifov@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

One suggestion. Make sure there are free open source translation tools (OS independent) for DocBook, because DHIS docs should be translated into many other languages too. 

regards,
murod




________________________________
From: Jason Pickering <jason.p.pickering@xxxxxxxxx>
To: dhis2-devs <dhis2-devs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2009 12:01:03 AM
Subject: [Dhis2-devs] DHIS 2 Documentation

Hi Everyone,

I have been speaking with Jan and Old a bit about documentation and before I start committing anything, or making too many changes, I would like to get some feedback from everyone. 

Let me be quite honest. I find the documentation of DHIS2 to be quite appalling. It is scattered between different Wiki sites, Launchpad, mailing lists, and various documents here and there. We need to do better. 

Jan has started a document on the GIS portion of DHIS2 and I would like to suggest that we standardize all documentation by using the DocBook format.Visit  www.docbook.org for more info. I will not repeat the various advantages of using this format over others, other than to say it is very common, it is structured, and is supported by a large number of editors and can be transformed into essentially any format . Since DocBook is pure XML it is much more suited to the sort of distributed development environment we are working in, as opposed to say proprietary, binary word documents or other formats. 

Any reactions here? I have started a bit of work on the conversion of the GIS manual to DocBook format, but wanted to get feedback from the community before I proceeded much further. Of course, documentation in a structure format like XML will be a bit more painful, but there are several tools out there (many of them OpenSource) that provide good editors for the format. Of course the ability to transform this XML info many different formats, such as HTML, Word, PDF, JavaHelp files (the list is very long) is a big advantage in my mind. 

What does everyone think?

Best regards,
Jason