[Xapian-discuss] Xapian documentation

[James Aylett]

On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 09:42:16AM -0500, Peter Karman wrote:

> >>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? ;)

Or ed(1)? :-)

> I recommend DocBook XML, actually, and I've liked this free editor quite 
> a bit:
> 
>  http://xmlmind.com/xmleditor/

Hmm, I'll have a play.

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

The former. The latter wouldn't be tricky, and of course we can work
from the HTML if need be.

> 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).

I'd argue (although mostly for the sake of arguing :-) that doing
something because the majority of the Linux world does it is actually
a very bad idea. (Gee, let's all use CORBA :-)

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

Having played a little with XML Mind's editor, I'm inclined to think
DocBook is probably the way to go. It's just a pity it's still so
damned ugly :-)

J

-- 
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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org