[SciPy-dev] Re: Accessible SciPy (ASP) project

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

>>>>> "JS" == Janet Swisher <swisher at enthought.com> writes:

    JS> I disagree that OpenOffice.org is "substantially more
    JS> primitive" than Word for book-building. The current version
    JS> (1.1.3) is substantially improved over 1.0, and version 2.0
    JS> (in development) will be better yet. OOo and Word have
    JS> different strengths and weaknesses. While I haven't used OOo
    JS> for a project as large as you describe, I would place it above
    JS> Word and below FrameMaker in capability for book-length
    JS> projects, among WYSIWYG apps.

That is good to know, thanks for the information.

    >> However, if someone can post a similar description of a large
    >> effort to produce a book using different open tools, I would be
    >> interested to read it (the description, not the book!).

    JS> No personal experience, but another option that is widely used
    JS> in the open source world is the DocBook XML DTD. For example,
    JS> the Blender3d documentation uses it
    JS> (http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Documentation_Project.264.0.html). (This
    JS> page mentions using TeX for equations, but in a quick browse
    JS> of the Blender3d docs, I didn't see any.) There are probably
    JS> many other examples of open source projects that use
    JS> DocBook. It is also one of O'Reilly's accepted formats.

Just for completeness, MayaVi's user guide docs are generated using
Docbook.  Sources are here:

 http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/mayavi/htdocs/docs/guide/

My problem with it is that too many levels of tags are necessary and
they do tend to get in my way.  Plus it can't do equations at all.  So
it is out of the question for SciPy.  It does let one produce HTML and
PDF documents though.  By the looks of it, tbook seems better than
docbook.

cheers,
prabhu