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Subject: Re: DOCBOOK: Re: Message to GERSHON regarding DocBook, Epic and Word..


Something went screwy in the approval of this message. It should
have appeared to be from Sunthar, not me!

/ Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> was heard to say:
| Thanks for your response below to Jean. Many of the areas you've touched upon are of great interest to our Web publishing effort. Would you please send me your contact information? Thanks.
| 
| Sunthar Visuvalingam
| Director, Research and Development
| InformIT (Pearson Education)
| 201 W. 103rd Street, Indianapolis, IN 46290-1093
| (317) 817-7095 (W)	 voice, direct
| (800) 571-5840 x97095    voice, toll free
| (317) 817-7232           facsimile
| sunthar.visuvalingam@informit.com
| 
| -----Original Message-----
| From: owner-docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
| [mailto:owner-docbook@lists.oasis-open.org]
| Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2000 11:33 AM
| To: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
| Subject: RE: DOCBOOK: Choice of environment for working with Docbook?
| 
| Jean,
| 
| Summary:
| I recommend you use XML rather than SGML version of DocBook for your needs.
| I do recommend you use DocBook. Depending on your documentation needs, you
| may need to create a subset or extension of DocBook. Epic is the best
| choice. Period. You need not purchase their DocBook Application--you can
| create your own. If you are familiar with SGML/XML markup, FOSIs and DSSSL,
| it will cost you very much less than 15000 Euros to set up. If these
| acronyms sound like a foreign language to you, it is probably worth spending
| the 15k. I personally feel that 15k is too expensive for what you get. After
| spending 4000 Euros on Epic Publisher, you kind of expect the DocBook
| application to be thrown into the package too...
| 
| Details:
| I have taken three companies from Word to *ML, the last of which was to XML.
| All 3 cases were for technical documentation departments.
| 
| Company A is a leading telecommunications company, with a documentation team
| of 12. I set up their entire SGML application suite, which includes ADEPT
| Editor for authoring, ADEPT Publisher for printing, DynaText for online
| delivery on CD and DynaWeb for web delivery. They use a proprietary DTD,
| though structurally it has a lot in common with DocBook.
| 
| Company B had a very small budget, so we used WordPerfect9 for authoring and
| publish via Jade and DSSSL stylesheets. I developed a DocBook extension for
| them. The main reason for using SGML was because they required single
| sourcing to produce different versions of the document using conditional
| processing. This processing was impossible to set up using VBA.
| 
| Company C is where I currently work. We now use DocBook 4 (beta) and Epic 3
| Publisher. I have set up authoring and publishing using my own FOSIs and
| DSSSL stylesheets. I am still fine tuning the web publishing function. I
| have knocked the socks off my senior management by delivering in several
| formats from a single source, in less time it used to take them to prepare
| only printed versions from Word. And the quality provided by Epic for both
| print and HTML is far superior to Word.
| 
| I often use Omnimark to produce HTML where I need fine control of the
| output. I also use Omnimark to convert from Word to XML.
| 
| For your purposes, one or more copies of Epic Publisher and Epic Editor for
| the rest is all you need (provided you already have Adobe Acrobat installed
| on the Publisher computers).
| 
| You certainly can train Word people to work with Epic. I suggest you use a
| qualified Arbortext trainer for this. Some Word users will move easily to
| Epic, while others will require hand-holding. Have patience. All Word users
| eventually learn to think in terms of "writing structured content" instead
| of "presenting some content in a particular format". Some Word users like to
| see what it "looks" like, long after they have converted to Epic. Your
| initial authoring FOSI is very important here. It must display the
| information in a format similar to your primary output format. Most of our
| writers found it difficult to go back to work in Word after one month of
| "structured authoring".
| 
| I personally maintain that authoring and publishing in Epic is 4 X faster
| than doing the equivalent in Word, and the quality of the results is far
| superior. Even Word lovers eventually admit that they write twice as much
| content now than they used to in Word. I probably should not say this too
| loud, but I have been able to shrink the size of documentation teams to 1/3
| their original size and still output more than the original team was
| producing using Word. I have never used this to sell structured authoring to
| anyone, but it proves itself true after a while, and it makes the investment
| in moving to structured authoring even more worthwhile for the company.
| 
| Please note that I do not in any way work for Arbortext. I am just a
| satisfied customer, who has tried virtually every SMGL/XML authoring and
| publishing tool that exists. Er, I also use emacs, but I have not been able
| to convince any company to force their technical writers to use it ;-)
| 
| I hope this helps.
| 
| Gershon.
| 
| -----Original Message-----
| From: owner-docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
| [mailto:owner-docbook@lists.oasis-open.org]On Behalf Of Jean Jordaan
| Sent: Tuesday, March 07, 2000 6:06 PM
| To: Docbook (E-mail)
| Subject: DOCBOOK: Choice of environment for working with Docbook?
| 
| Dear Norm, and all
| 
|   This mail is a request for advice: what software do you use to
|   author Docbook?
| 
| ...

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | We look back on our life as a
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | thing of broken pieces, because
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | our mistakes and failures are
                                   | always the first to strike us, and
                                   | outweigh in our imagination what
                                   | we have accomplished and
                                   | attained.--Goethe



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