ubuntu-manual team mailing list archive

[Shaun McCance <shaunm@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2010-05-18 at 10:41 -0400, Adam Sommer wrote:
> 
> 
> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Matthew East <mdke@xxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>         
>         
>         For my part, I was hoping to provoke a very constructive
>         discussion
>         with my post about specific improvements that can be made and
>         ways for
>         collaboration. I think that Kevin's post had the same
>         intention. Let's
>         stick to that.


> I agree, and thanks Matthew for your response to Kevin's email.  I
> think your right and everyone has the same goals, and truly wants
> Ubuntu to have the best documentation possible.
> 
> 
> In that regard and building on Jim's ideas on content format... is
> there a tool, or set of tools, to convert between the various formats?
> To my current thinking it doesn't much matter which format the
> "content pool" is stored in as long as there is an easy way to convert
> between DocBook, Mallard, and Latex (and any additional formats).

Converting from Mallard to most other formats should be
fairly straightforward, although the writing style that
gets used for topic-oriented help might not be suitable
for a book.

To create a book from different resources, you'll probably
want a format to define the overall structure. I mentioned
DITA bookmaps in a previous email, which can reference
material in different formats. I forgot to mention that
the DocBook Technical Committee is working on something
called DocBook Assemblies. There's not a lot of information
out there on assemblies right now, but you can search the
docbook-tc email archive:

http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-tc/

I don't think you're going to find off-the-shelf tools
that support the content that GNOME and Ubuntu create
and creates the kind of output that ubuntu-manual wants.
But it's worthwhile to look at existing formats as a
starting point.

--
Shaun