I have been charged for the construction of a document system / platform
One of the great requirements here The short list is:
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Easily localized: A dozen or more languages will be required to support outside the gate. (The ability to add / update translations to non-technical personnel will be a big plus, although 100% is not required)
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Flexibility in output formats: PDF and minimum The documents need to be output as HTML (either as a whole or selected part)
via an intuitive user interface (web, ideally) Managed and deployed bonus points
I am thinking that people know about any system from there, which already supports these types of things? I am not against writing it from scratch, but if I can help it, then I do not want to change the wheel again.
Two main candidates are so far away and it seems that there has been a fame for the East, well, I am unaware of either sucking, but I have been told that the rest is there for me Will take a good part.
Any other suggestions? Would I want to make it better than scratch?
If you need to make traditional technical documentation: books, divided into chapters, divided into sections, etc. . I think there are three main things to consider: markup itself, editing toolchain and publishing toolkain.
Markup. DocBook XML Markup is very extensive, which includes support for almost every imaginable aspect, which can be included in a technical category and then something. It includes basic stuff for books such as cross-references, footnotes etc., as well as markup for program documentation such as software documentation, reference entries etc. The references for markup have been done by Norman Walsh and Leonard Mullner.
The language of the content can be clearly marked using the lang attributes, so that the source document has content in many languages, and the desired language version is extracted in the processing phase. can go .
Authoring Tools. Because of the size of the DocBook terminology, some types of "schema-aware" editors are very much needed. A good editor will help you with the choice of markup elements and ensure that you produce valid markup. There will be a decent XML editor, but depending on the technical texts of your documentation writers, you can consider some more user friendly too. Some WYSIWYG-style editors are available (I have used, and I was very happy with it.)
Publishing Tools. D-Facto standard way of generating output from DocBook XML markup is the standard way of styling sheets including HTML, XSL-FO (for PDF output), HTML help, and even man pages. The output produced by the stylesheet can be controlled with several parameters, and firstly when you want to tune the output, it is distributed with the stylesheets.
If and if you want more control over the output produced, however, you need to customize the XSLT stylesheet for your particular use. This may seem somewhat difficult, especially if you do not have prior experience with XSLT, however, there is an excellent free book available on the subject: by Bob Stathon
to convert XSL-FO to PDF , You will also need an XSL-FO processor, free and open source, and then there are many business options.
Most likely, your publication process might look like a build system for your documents. You will have an automated system (probably operated by build or build like builds) that will move your documents into XML and convert them to the desired output format in the desired languages.
In short, I would say that the docbook is a good option if you are looking like a linear book, then detailed technical documentation. The key downsides are the complexity of the markup, which can offer a great learning curve for the authors, and which can make special authoring tools necessary, besides the DocBook XSL stylesheets can be quite involved in customizing the output.
If you want to create less "book-like" and more "online-like" documentation - Document related to each other - you want to take a look at other XML-based options I have not used it, but it comes with toolchain for the production of various output formats with XML markup.
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