From: Niklas Frykholm <r2d2@...>
Date: 2002-01-28T08:17:37+09:00
Subject: Re: OT: tools for creating documentation

[Phil Tomson]:
> I'm going to be creating a good bit of documentation for TaskMaster and I 
> want to easily be able to have it available in several formats including 
> html, postscript and perhaps TeX.  I'm curious as to what tools other 
> people are using for such tasks?

I usually use

  XML/Custom -> HTML
             -> LaTeX  -> postscript
	                   -> pdf

In other words I start with a document in XML format, or a custom
format if XML seems to verbose (for some documents a simple tabular
layout works much better than XML). I try to ensure that the source
document is as simple as possible to read and write (that is, after
all, where I will be spending most of my time).

I then create custom parsers based on REXML to convert the XML source
into HTML and LaTeX. I use the same parsers for all similar documents,
i.e., one for letters, one for articles, etc. From LaTeX I generate
postscript and pdf using standard tools.

// Niklas