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Subject: Re: AW: DOCBOOK: docbook suitable for book - creation ?
On Sun, 17 Nov 2002 20:33:25 +0100 "Stephan Wiesner" <stephan@stephan-wiesner.de> wrote: > Framemaker can import DocBook. So you could write it in DocBook and do > the final layout with that. You would probably need a week to learn how > to use Framemaker, though. > Just another idea we were playing around with. I'm curious... When somebody suggests that it would take "a week to learn" FrameMaker, LaTex, DocBook... whatever, do they usually mean: a) a week of 8-hour workdays (i.e., actually five or six working days) while spending the majority of your time doing other stuff, like -- your research -- your job, for which your employer is actually paying you? b) a week of 8-hour workdays, in which you spend every minute of that 40+ hours reading and trying and re-trying to get (whichever) software to do what you need it to do? c) a "week" of 24-hour days (168 hours), perhaps actually interspersed with "a life", and therefore taking a tad longer in sidereal time? I feel like a real dummy, that it took me several weeks to learn FrameMaker, although I was producing useful documents with it within a couple of days of starting my job. It was only as I had more time with it, and more interaction (mailing list) with advanced users that I learned how badly I'd done the first few docs, and how much re-work was needed so that they would be smoothly and efficiently repeatable, expandable, re-usable in future. That's not to say that the first docs were ugly to look at, in final form, but the hidden stuff was not something I'd want to see today. Every time I turn around, somebody is making different claims for DocBook (and whether the pure-and-godly way to do it is DSSSL or XSL, or... whatever the other choices are). One minute I'me hearing that I could fire up OpenJade and have finished product in half an hour, and the next minute, I'm being told that... well, no, actually, that would only give me an output file that I'd then have to bring into some other system to produce actual human-usable printouts, or cross- referenced and hot-linked PDFs, etc. One minute, its the perfect solution for the single, busy writer in a small company, and the next it's "oh no, I wouldn't take that on unless I had a department of people, including one or two who could dedicate themselves full-time to DTD creation..." So, what's the poop? If I am producing quite acceptable and timely output in (say) Frame, BUT am moving to a platform where Frame is not available, yet still need to produce docs that are laid out to the company/marketing-dept. standards, AND keep meeting deadlines that are getting closer and closer together every month... is DocBook (and OpenJade, or fill-in-your-favorite-solution) the ideal solution for me? /kevin
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