Re: Large Document Software Tools Recommendations

Subject: Re: Large Document Software Tools Recommendations
From: "Sandy Harris" <sharris -at- dkl -dot- com>
To: "Leary William" <wleary -at- laquinta -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 02 May 2000 09:54:42 -0400

"Leary, William" wrote:

> Our company needs to put large documents (i.e. hundreds of pages and up)
> online, and I have been assigned to find the tool(s) for the job. The
> documents will mainly consist of standard operating procedures, which are
> table-heavy documents that they would like to have indexed, and accessible
> via tables of contents that should be able to be generated automatically. As
> well, the tool(s) need to be able to generate print-ready documentation, as
> well as HTML output.
>
> I just wanted to see if anyone had any recommendations on a tool other than
> FrameMaker with WebWorks. I've never used either, however from my research,
> it appears like this is the ideal solution for our needs. However, is there
> any other tools we should take a look at? ...

Have a look at DocBook, am SGML or XML DTD that supports output to HTML (either
one section per file or one big file), PDF, Postscript, ... and automatic
generation of TOC, index, etc.

http://www.docbook.org
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/

O'Reilly publishers and several Unix vendors were involved in developing it and
it has been used both for published books and large product documentation projects.

Frame+SGML can be used with this DTD. That would be the first thing I'd look at
in your situation. There a also lots of other tool alternatives. Essentially
any tool that handles either SGML or XML.

DocBook is replacing the LinuxDoc DTD for Linux HowTo documents. See the Linux
Documentation Project web site:

http://www.linuxdoc.org/

both for examples and for info on various free tools for working with DocBook.
There is similar info at the Open Source Writers' Group:

http://www.oswg.org

In particular, they link to stuff on the Frame+SGML DocBook support:
http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs/docbook-intro/obtaining-and-installing-framemaker-sgml.html
efforts.




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