[Xapian-discuss] Xapian documentation

[Peter Karman]

James Aylett scribbled on 5/8/06 9:19 AM:

>> Did you consider DocBook SGML as a document format ? 
> 
> Not really. It's SGML, which is all pointy and nasty. Unless there's a
> good free document editor for it, of course?
> 

you mean, besides vi/emacs? ;)

I recommend DocBook XML, actually, and I've liked this free editor quite 
a bit:

  http://xmlmind.com/xmleditor/



>> It has many users and usages and a lot of support behind it.
> 
> My understanding is that it can't do indexing terribly well, which was
> one of the main reasons halibut is a full document processor rather
> than just a wrapper. This was a while back, so it's probably come on
> since then. Having had a quick look at the manual, its syntax is
> horrific, so we'd need a good editor we could recommend to people.
> 

Do you mean "indexing" as in "creating a published index of key terms" 
or indexing as in "made electronically searchable" ala Xapian?

DocBook really is the industry standard for technical documentation. 
Aside from the corporate users (Sun, Cray, SGI, Apple among them), the 
OSS world uses it a lot too (see the Subversion manual, which is all XML 
DocBook, and also many many Linux doc projects).

There are many good free tools for DocBook publishing, the best among 
them the XSLT stuff from Norm Walsh et al.

And yes, DocBook XML has good indexing support as in "creating a 
published index of key terms". See the many index tags.

-- 
Peter Karman  .  http://peknet.com/  .  peter at peknet.com