On Thursday 17 November 2011 12:56:56 pm Calvin Morrison wrote:
On 17 November 2011 12:47, Darrell Anderson humanreadable@yahoo.com wrote:
Excuse me if I jump in the discussion just to put my 2 cents about the editor. What about the good old LyX?
It's easy to use, it outputs LaTeX, it's multi-platform and it's Free Software.
Lyx is a front-end wrapper to LaTeX. Basically then we're back to discussing markup. :) Lyx could be an option for some documentation teams, but the internal team still needs to learn LaTex. Doable if
those
involved have the time for that kind of thing. :)
Much of our recent discussion has been how to encourage non team
members
to contribute where nothing more than everyday word processor skills
are
expected.
For internal purposes the leading focus is using a format that is maintainable in GIT for merging collaborative changes in a team environment. Hence the arguments in favor of markup, which is text
based.
I think we have agreed to ODT, which fundamentally is XML, which is
text
based.
ODT allows writers to use any software supporting that format and does not limit contributors to a specific tool chain.
Darrell
Actually I am almost certain only LibreOffice and the now dead OpenOffice can import and work in fodt. Odt support is pretty standard
Can someone shed light on this?
I can't speak toward FODT since I don't use it. I think we should just use plain ODT.
If we use FODT, most distros will include OpenOffice/LibreOffice by default. It includes a familiar interface closely resembling most other office apps (except MS Office 2007+, but older version still resemble OOo/LO).
OOo and LO both have Windows/Mac version, some Win/Mac users use it. Not all people will want to install it, hence my argument in favor of plain ODT, which is supported by MS Office 2007 and (it now seems) most other office apps.
The biggest issue here is that ODT files are compressed binary blobs, and therefore work rather terribly in version control systems. Maybe it would work better to automatically create a "HEAD" ODT file from the FODT in the GIT repository that anyone can download/edit, and when it comes time to merge their changes we can open the .odt and export as .fodt prior to commit.
Tim