Advice for a document management system

[Plumber Bob]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Aaron Vegh <aaronvegh-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>
> My advice to the client was that, if they moved away from Word, they would
> be taking a great deal of uncertainty out of the equation. I mentioned
> either LaTeX or some other kind of customized XML-based solution as a way to
> circumvent these format transition issues. The goal being to work with plain
> text rather than an opaque file format.
>

I happen to be in the midst of migrating a 300-ish page document from
Open Office to DocBook(v5) XML and rendering it with a very beta
Apache Tomcat-based  application named "Calenco"

   http://trac.calenco.com/
   http://sourceforge.net/projects/calenco/

I haven't yet solved the problem of migrating Word / OO users to
another friendly program that can edit DocBook XML, and I'm using
emacs for the time being. Having said that, I've already received
edits to the XML from programmers, and hallelujah, I can use "diff"!

DocBook v5 uses Uncode, so we expect multi-language translation to be
more straightforward than using LateX. So far, I'm quite happy with
multi-HTML and PDF output, complete with auto-TOC, indices, and
embedded linking.

This whole effort is very much in progress, but for example, if I
discover that Apache FOP (which renders the PDF) isn't capable of
doing something (Aramaic, perhaps), then there are other tools that
can be inserted to that spot in the rendering toolchain.

Imagine: treating documentation like software. Heresy!

Cheers,
Mike
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