Advice for a document management system

[Aaron Vegh]

Hi all,
Thanks so far for your answers, both off- and on-list. I've been  
reviewing these responses and trying to wrap my head around this  
problem. Ultimately, I'm not looking to have a role in this project;  
ideally I'd like to find someone who I could feel comfortable  
introducing to my client, that can run with this problem.  I have some  
concerns, however, with what I've read so far.

1. Substituting OO.o for MS Office doesn't strike me as a winning  
proposition. In my (albeit limited) use of the application, I've come  
away with the impression that while it may solve some issues, it will  
create others. In the end, the client will end up with different  
headaches altogether.

2. LaTeX or DocBook XML, while clearly a respected choice by this  
group, is also to be approached with great caution. The assumption  
being that non-technical users will balk at it. I get that, for sure.  
But I still wonder if, with the right template design, a LaTeX or  
DocBook expert couldn't put together a sample document, and arrange  
for training of the staff who will use this. I think once people saw  
this text-based file on the one hand, then saw a single command given  
and boom! instant, perfect HTML and PDF versions -- they would find  
that very persuasive. Perhaps persuasive enough to actually learn and  
use this thing.

Let me be a bit more specific now. The client is the Ontario  
Legislature. They are required to produce "Hansards", verbatim  
transcripts of the proceedings of the legislature. These documents are  
published on their web site. Here's an example of a PDF of a recent  
legislative session:

http://www.ontla.on.ca/house-proceedings/transcripts/files_pdf/29-JAN-2009_L108.pdf

You'll note that the document is both quite long and features a fairly  
complicated layout, not to mention a large number of individual  
paragraph and character styles. There are also errors in the rendering  
of this document (for example, several blank pages). The original  
documents produced in Word are done with very specific Word styles, so  
I would say that the users are slightly above your average "non- 
technical".

My thinking is that, any solution that requires post-processing is not  
adequate. They already have a system that has several idiosyncrasies,  
and exchanging that for another one (OO-based) is probably not going  
to be accepted.

If there are any serious, knowledgeable advocates of a clean document  
creation pipeline, I'm looking forward to hearing from you. If you  
feel this can be done with OO without compromising the translation  
between formats, show me some examples using documents as complex as  
the kind at issue here! :-)

Cheers,
Aaron.
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