Re: [Firebird-docs] Which kind of docs?

[Paul V. <pa...@vi...>]

Hi Thad,

> The vast majority of my work with Firebird (90+%) has been with
> embedded SQL so that seems to be what I'm most qualified to write
> on.

Sounds logical.

> I'm a bit unsure of some of the transaction handling but I might
> be able to blunder thru it. And I'm sure my boss and family will
> forgive my inattention.

Hmm... I wonder what Dr. Phil would have to say about this ;-)

> What do you have as a formatting guide? Is this all to be in MS
> Word, Open Office Writer, or some sort of XML tagging? I would think
> the simpler the better till we're ready to go "final".

The idea is to write the docs in XML, using the DocBook DTD. This way
we can produce different output formats (HTML, PDF, RTF, PS...) and
it's platform-independent - a good thing because Firebird runs on a
number of platforms.

If you read the webpage I mentioned a couple of days ago, and follow
some of the links, you'll find more about this, including some
guidelines written by David Jencks about tag choosing.

Myself, I don't really dig writing long documents in XML (or maybe I
should say: I don't know of a free or affordable editor that makes XML
writing a pleasure) but I agree it is the best choice because it's so
versatile and you keep the structure very manageable - *and* you can
finetune how the output is going to look like.

If you really really hate XML or it takes you too much time I suppose
you could choose another format - after all, an Embedded SQL Guide in
Word or HTML is better than no Embedded SQL Guide at all.

Greetings,
Paul Vinkenoog