Jim Busser wrote:
On Jun 14, 2004, at 11:10 PM, Michael Bonert wrote:
Installation aside, it would be wonderful if the manuals
went Wiki.
The current "draft" manuals, which however cannot be directly edited,
are referenced at:
http://hherb.com/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Gnumed/DocumentationMain
I suspect Hilmar or Ian have periodically made edits to "source" text
that they maintain elsewhere, in SGML.
I have not yet seen offered any detailed plan for how to transition
this. A cut and paste of each of the sections would be tedious, but
possible. I don't think the wiki can easily render in the same way as
the html in the draft manuals, for example two levels of nested
numbering (e.g. 4.2) or the blocks of shaded text, though I am not
saying we need it, we would just have to agree if it is worth giving
up.
I just did a Google search and found something which simply didn't
exist before but has existed since April 8th, 2004 and there have been
five releases since then.
http://doc-book.sourceforge.net/homepage
Here's the info:
DocBookWiki can also be used to edit a DocBook
document online, from the web. Editing will be done one section at a
time,
so the editor selects first the section that he wants to edit, and then
edits it. He can edit it in several modes: text (like wiki), xml (the
original format), html, latex, texi, etc., whichever is more suitable
for
him. The changes, however, are always saved in the XML(DocBook) format.
Authentication of the editors (with username, password) can be enabled
as
well, if necessary. Also, different editing permissions can be assigned
to them as well.
It allows the viewers of a document to download the document in
other
formats, like PDF, RTF, Plain HTML, LaTeX, PS, etc. which can be
generated
automatically from the DocBook format.
DocBookWiki will also try to keep a history of
all the
modifications made to the document, by keeping the document chunks in
CVS,
and so keeping track of all the changes.
The features of DocBookWiki can be summarized like
this:
- Can display a DocBook document online.
- Can display several documents at once (a list of books).
- Can display each of them in several languages.
- Allows to edit a certain section of a certain book in a certain
language.
- Editing can be done in several modes, like text, html, xml, texi,
latex etc.
- The basic format is always DocBook (XML), no matter how it is
displayed or edited.
- Each document (in each language) can be converted automatically
into other formats (like PDF, RTF, LaTeX, etc.) for downloading.
- All the history of modifications is kept (in CVS) and any
previous versions of a document can be recovered (by tag or by date) by
the admin of the site.
In short, DocBookWiki will be like a wikiwiki
which
saves the content in XML (DocBook) format.
Part of the existing manuals' content (source code commenting, also
communicating the PG table layouts) we can automate. It may not be
feasible to host the output directly into the wiki, but we can link
the output. I have not heard from Tony Lembke in some time, I am not
sure if he is upset with me over some ideas I had sent him privately
or maybe, like many, he is just REALLY busy. Assuming Tony cannot
easily, within the next month or two, implement the epydoc and PG
autodoc to-dos at
http://hherb.com/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Gnumed/WebsiteTODO, he might be
content if someone who might like to do it would step forward. AFAIK
only Tony has more than simple web editing access to gnumed.org so
either his help would still be needed to host epydoc and PG autodoc
there, or these would have to be hosted elsewhere (hherb.com?)
--
David J. Grant
http://davidgrant.ca
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