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Subject:Re: Code for publishing PDF from Confluence From:Robert Lauriston <robert -at- lauriston -dot- com> To:techwr-l <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 8 Jul 2014 17:59:24 -0700
I find working in Confluence generally similar to working in Flare.
The XHTML source is very similar.
The huge advantage is that collaboration is super-easy. No more
wasting hours copying content from a wiki or Word to a HAT.
Formatting options are limited but I'm minimalist about that so it's
not an issue.
List indentation is automatic.
For navigation I use the built-in hierarchical page tree, which is
very similar to Flare's TOC UI.
You don't need to worry about tags. I use them only to flag pages as
internal so they don't appear in customer-facing PDFs or online help.
Scroll PDF Export generates bookmarks and optionally a traditional
front-matter TOC from the page tree. Again similar to Flare.
Scroll PDF also has an index option, I haven't used it but it seems
similar to Flare. You can define index terms with page tags and/or
with inline marker macros.
There are various ways you can format images. I don't expect or need
to edit images in my authoring tool, though there are add-ons for that
if you wanted to.
On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 5:26 PM, Keith Hood <bus -dot- write -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> My experience with Confluence makes me wonder why you would want to use it
> to author documentation. It's OK for setting up a wiki but it's cumbersome
> and the formatting options are very limited. Getting the indentation in a
> list correct is just about impossible. It gives you no way to edit or
> format images. I'm not sure if you can make a TOC or an index in
> Confluence. For navigation it uses a hiearchy of parent-child pages you
> have to keep track of a bunch of page tags in order to relate pages to each
> other. I think for something that is not supposed to be made accessible as
> wiki pages, you'd be much better off using software that was designed for
> desktop publishing.
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