ubuntu-developer-manual team mailing list archive

[Stuart Langridge <stuart.langridge@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2011-01-24 at 17:50 -0600, Belinda Lopez wrote:
> Hi folks,
>    I wanted to bring up the discussion about moving docbook markup and 
> away from the current latex-based toolchain.  There are several reasons 
> for this; most important is the need for html output.  We started with 
> the toolchain being used by the manual project b/c I knew it worked for 
> PDF output but was recently made aware that we really need html first 
> and the PDF is secondary to that.  That along with the translations 
> being easier, made me conclude that the docbook-based toolchain has many 
> benefits.  So I'm proposing that we migrate to docbook and I'll take the 
> brunt of the work doing the markup and creating a new branch.  Kyle has 
> offered to continue working on some better tools for the make process 
> and we'll continue to refine the toolchain along the way.  So if there 
> are no strong objections, I'd like to propose that we migrate the 
> project to a docbook-based toolchain.

If we primarily care about HTML, and secondarily about PDF...why not
write the book *in* HTML? See Mark Pilgrim's reasons for doing so for
his books at http://mark.pilgrim.usesthis.com/ and
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/03/27/dive-into-history-2009-edition and in particular I should note that HTML's a lot better known than DocBook is. :)

sil