Re: [Embedlets-developer] Re: OpenOffice vs. Forrest

[Nicola K. B. <nic...@ap...>]

Jac Kersing wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Feb 2003, Ted Kosan wrote:
> 
>>What do other people think of the possibility of using Forrest for our
>>documentation needs?
> 
> First impression, very nice. However I do have some questions:
> - Is Forrest able to handle large multi chapter documents? All the 
> webpages have the 'printer friendly' button, but that's only that single 
> page and I would like our pdfs to contain all chapters, not one pdf for 
> each chapter.

This is a feature that's been worked upon.

> - What would we use to edit the documents and diagrams? I'm not 
> particulary fond of having to edit XML files when creating documentation. 
> The tags tend to distract from the contents... (would that be one of the 
> reasons the word userbase outnumbers the TeX [or insert your favorite 
> here] userbase??)
> 
> BTW, my second concern is valid for docbook as well. XmlMind XML Editor 
> enables more or less wysiwyg editing, but it's not OpenOffice.

I understand this concern. Currently we support SVG for diagrams, and 
Openoffice can

> The options so far are (if I remember correctly):
> * OpenOffice
>   + free full blown office suite with editor and graphics module
>   + wysiwyg
>   = XML based storage, however with proprietary DTD
>   - large (a lot of disk space and not very fast)
>   - no pdf creation without commercial plugins (afaik)
> * DocBook
>   + XML standard documents use whatever editor you like
>   + output to pdf, html, rtf and more
>   - no real wysiwyg tools for editing
>   - no standardized graphics input format
> * Forrest
>   + XML documents
>   + ouput to HTML and pdf
>   + standard graphics format????
>   - no wysiwyg editors
> 
> Please help by adding to/correcting this list...

There are errors in the above, because you are mixing tools that are not 
the same thing.

  - Openoffice here is a wordprocessor and a vector drawing program.
  - Docbook is a file format
  - Forrest is a publishing tool

One could use all of them if he wanted: people are working on a 
OO->Docbook filter, and Forrest can quite easily work with DocBook.

Let's see if we can get the best of these tools:

Forrest as a publishing system has no rivals in the above comparison.
It can not publish sites that use these file formats:
     - Forrest document DTD
     - html
     - wiki format
     - simplified docbook (almost there)
     - SVG (automatic rendering to SVG)

It has only one issue: no editor.

Solution: make Forrest accept openoffice files as a source of content.
Forrest is based on Cocoon, and with Apache Cocoon it's very easy to add 
this kind of functionality.

The problem of the CVS diffs remains though, since diffing binaries file 
is not possible, and diffs of the xml format of OpenOffice sucks badly.

Currently Forrest is able to use html files as input, so using a simple 
html editor is another option. The html DTD doesn't suck that much, and 
decent editors make decent html source.

Basically, it all boils down to the editor and the format it saves in.
AbiWord for example saves in docbook, but deosnt' have sections and no 
tables :-(

Any further suggestion about editors and formats they save in?

-- 
Nicola Ken Barozzi                   nic...@ap...
             - verba volant, scripta manent -
    (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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