Hi, Helen.
> The point I make is that it's not the access to the source materials that is
> the inhibitor to recycling the Borland stuff. It is that Inprise, later Borland,
> now Embarcadero, have been unwilling to open the doc sources.
> The commercial arguments against that ever coming about are obvious.
>
> Since acquiring the content using any PDF-to-something tool violates the
> licensing terms regarding decompilation of Embarcadero assets, the wide
> availability of such tools doesn't help us. Now, as then, there is no choice
> but to rewrite from scratch.
Fully agree. In russian communities we already discussed it.
There are no choises to import-and-use or transform or even
copy-paste Langref text to our docs - the only solution is to
write (rewrite as I said) it from scratch.
> But, even if the source were available to us, it is not mainly the need to
> rewrite that inhibits the progress of Firebird documentation, but the lack
> of [re]writers willing to develop content. We delude ourselves to claim otherwise.
It seem's, I misunderstood you. You suggest not to [re]write it, but to
write new docs so after some time we do not need original Langref?
In russian we've already made some steps in this, but in english...
I think Langref (our Langref - Full SQL Reference, not original) is the
first-priority task for us, may be even main (except RN, of course).
> IMO, the standard set by Paul V in the LangRef updates makes the fresh
> Firebird langref stuff more user-friendly than the Borland predecessors, anyway.
There are several opinions about it. :-) I personally agree - Langref is too
"heavy" and less user-friendly than LRUs. But I've heard many (too many)
"coment" about this - there is much to improve. Sorry, Paul, I'm really very
grateful to you (and all others who do this work). :-)
> Incidentally, the format of the on-line language resources published by the
> DITA community for DITA (sourced in DITA, natch!) seem to me to be a lot
> more user-friendly than B-N diagrams.
How it relates to subj? You suggest to use DITA instead of DOCBOOK ?
Or this is just an example of good doc?
WBR, GR
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