Re[2]: DOCBOOK: General roadmap questions

[John Eadie <jae@c-art.com>]

Hi Stephen,

There are other vendor choices than the ones that were suggested
to you.  In some ways ArborText's products could be said to be the
best, but I don't know that they are best for anyone starting out
with *ML, or being the main tool if XML is your orientation.

You might like Adobe's FrameMaker+SGML, or SoftQuad's XMetaL, since
I think it's fair to say both are simpler to start using DocBook with ..
FrameMaker+SGML out-of-the box comes with a DocBook set-up, although not
the most recent.  If you want non-XML-gurus (ordinary engineers, or marketing
people) to edit content, we've found that XMetaL is a very good choice - we
actually recommend adding XMetaL tool to FM+SGML workgroups to some
customers.

Yes, we sell both products (also provide consulting).  We're also pretty
close to you - a long-ish bike ride away in North Vancouver.  However,
you should check things out - at least in XMetaL's case, it's
a much simpler product.  (And far cheaper, also  %^)

SR> We are looking at using DocBook for our internal documentation.  I 
SR> have been able to succesfully generate a DocBook document using just a 
SR> text editor but this isn't a reasonable solution for marketing and 
SR> even our programmers will probably show less resistance if there are 
SR> some easy to use tools available.

SR> I have tried to navigate the Arbortext site, but it isn't clear what 
SR> we would need.  I am not sure why they have split their product into 
SR> so many pieces.  For example, what is the difference between the Epic 
SR> Editor and Epic Editor LE?  And why would I need a separate 
SR> application to print -- is it not possible to print from within the 
SR> editor?

As you might expect from Adobe, regular FrameMaker+SGML prints
beautifully, is 99.9% WYSIWYG, comes integrated with Acrobat
Distiller, etc.

Cheers,

-jae

--
John Eadie [JE46]  (604) 922-5104  Cell: (604) 728-5104
COMPUTING ART Inc ~ Incorporated '89 ~ http://www.c-art.com
`Grace does not overcome nature, but makes it perfect.'
   .. Meister Eckhart, Fragments, #229