Re: [Springframework-developer] SVG editor??? (and documentation)

[Colin S. <col...@ex...>]

Alef Arendsen (JTeam) wrote:

> All,
>
> Does anybody know a good SVG editor. I don't want to buy Illustrator 
> or Fireworks or something, just because I want to create a simple SVG 
> diagram.
>
> OpenOffice has SVG support, but it does not seem to be compliant 
> somehow (I'm getting errors when I'm putting an OpenOffice generated 
> SVG in a PDF using FOP). For UML stuff, I'm using ArgoUML, which is 
> quite ok, but for overview diagrams and stuff. Any ideas?
>
> Oh, and I've committed a little update on the reference docs. Did a 
> lot of work on the mvc controllers, pertty much covers everthing 
> except some examples and more detailed explanation on the form- and 
> commandcontrollers… It's getting somewhere I think :)
>
> Alef
>
> P.s. Trying out docbook internally now to do design docs (instead of 
> word). Works great (in the cvs, integrated into the CI build, 
> simultaneously working on designs is much easier now, while still 
> being able to maintain one document for a customer)…
>
Alef,

Depending on how complicated your documents are, you might want to take 
a look at Python's reStructructuredText (reST) library. I find it a lot 
easier to work with than something like DocBook, especially for 
something like design documentation.

You have a very easy to write source that has minimal markup, which is 
then transformed into HTML or PDF. Here's some samples from the Python 
PEPs (Python Enhancement Proposal)

the final HTML:
http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0321.html
the source:
http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0321.txt

the final HTML:
http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0012.html
the source:
http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0012.txt

Here's some info on reStructuredText:
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/rst/quickstart.html
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/rst/quickref.html
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/spec/rst/reStructuredText.html

If you use ZWiki, which is a Zope implementation of Wiki, it even 
supports reStructuredText as page types (does the output generation as 
soon as you look at the page), so you can author the documents 
collaboratively.

Regards,
Colin