[Typo3-typo3org] documentation.typo3.org

[Robert Lemke]

Michael Scharkow wrote:

> I think the difficulty is that every format discussed here has too many
> features to be converted back and forth to some other format without a
> lot of work. 

Yes, that is the point.

> For example, db2xhtml works wonderfully but the other way 
> round sucks. Parsing sxw works (as you have yourself proven, but I don't
> know how much effort this is), writing sxw has not been done very
> frequently.

Writing SXW is not a big problem. If we decide to use the OASIS format as
our common base, then I can integrate write support in the Documents Suite.
Some people want that anyway ...

> I stumbled over http://phpdocwriter.sourceforge.net/ yesterday, which
> can write sxw plus convert sxw to pdf, html and stuff. This seems the
> most promising tool so far, although it's pretty backwards, having a PHP
> class wrapping a Python class wrapping Openoffice API stuff which is
> Java or C++.

I know that project, it's nice but not general enough for my taste. Again:
If we decide to go the OpenOffice way (which I tend to), then we can have
solution which reads and writes that format. So in the end, any other
format which can be transformed into SXW would be supported as well.

> http://xml.openoffice.org/xmerge/docbook/
> 
> I did not get very far, because I could not install the export filter in
> my 2.0beta, which means (it took me some time to figure that out) that
> not even trivial sections (marked as heading X) work out of the box. The
> results were ridiculous.
> 
>> If that is as easy as writing manuals with OpenOffice like we do now, I
>> don't see a reason *not* switching to DocBook.
> 
> Honestly, I had far better results with that French python script
> converting sxw than with 'native' OO export filters as mentioned above.
> 
> At this point I agree with the guys who deem it impossible to do WYSIWYG
> style docbook editing now.

Okay, so it's too difficult to set up anyways. 

How can we take a decision on this matter? Vote on it? Or make a SWOT
analysis before?

-- 
robert