Hello,
I am very impressed with the quality of the QNX books and on-line
documentation.
Can anyone tell me what tool(s) does QSSL use in order to generate these
docs?
Or, can someone suggest a tool that I can use to write documents in one
format, then generate all these formats: PDF, HTML, MS-Word .doc, etc.
I know that Word can generate HTML, but the formatting gets really messed
up. I want a tool that will generate IDENTICAL formatted document in all
formats.
Thank you!
Alain Achkar
Alain Achkar <aachkar@storagequest.com> wrote:
: Hello,
: I am very impressed with the quality of the QNX books and on-line
: documentation.
Thank-you!
: Can anyone tell me what tool(s) does QSSL use in order to generate these
: docs?
We write our docs in SGML, using a variety of text editors under QNX 4 and
QNX 6. We have a couple of Python programs that parse the SGML. One
converts it to HTML. The other converts it to LaTeX, which we then use to
produce DVI and finally PostScript.
Some people consider our doc tools rather archaic, but they work (well,
mostly). They’re several years old, and run under QNX 4; we hope to port
them to QNX 6. We don’t have a nice WYSIWYG interface, but the fact that
our tools run on QNX means that we work in the environment that we document,
and the docs and software for a release can be built together.
There are a few drawbacks: LaTeX is temperamental, and we have to hold our
tongues the right way for things to work. We’ve learned to live with the
bizarre spacing that LaTeX sometimes does at the top of a page. We have
to stick to using very simple tables (oh, to have FrameMaker’s tables!), and
we have to remember not to do Things That Just Don’t Work.
The conversion to HTML is much simpler and works very well.
: Or, can someone suggest a tool that I can use to write documents in one
: format, then generate all these formats: PDF, HTML, MS-Word .doc, etc.
: I know that Word can generate HTML, but the formatting gets really messed
: up. I want a tool that will generate IDENTICAL formatted document in all
: formats.
We looked at using FrameMaker, which produces beautiful printed output, but
requires an additional tool to produce HTML. We’re required to use tools
that let the docs be included in the daily build of our software, so that
was a big strike against FrameMaker.
If anyone has any other ideas for tools, we’d love to hear them.