BTW, FrameMaker 7.0 is available for the Macintosh. And recent UNIX
versions of FrameMaker are also available. Anything in the FM7 series
should be cheap via eBay. FrameMaker 8 or 9 would not be necessary for
DocBook, as even the "ancient" (still used in some houses) pre-2002 FM
6 would suffice.
UNIX isn't Linux. Do any versions work on Linux? When you say "cheap",
what approximate price do you mean? Can people outside the US also get
FM cheap?
The last FM for Linux was FM 5.5.6 (I might even still have a copy
around... somewhere). Since then they've dropped all support for Linux,
and shifted their primary focus to Windows.
The last FM for Apple was 7.0 for MAC OS9 - they did not make/release an
OSX version. You could run it in compat mode (or whatever it is called
on older OSX versions) but that is no longer possible from what I've
been told with the latest OSX releases.
Solaris support was dropped for FM9.
So... in my opinion - even though I really like FM, and have used it a
lot in the past for tech writing - FM is not really the route I would
support for any OOo documentation.
Mixing in other editors into a FM environment (in my experience) is
complex and full of problems. None of the other editors I've used fit
well into a FM-centric workflow.
A single editor and a single/simple workflow for that editor is a lot
more manageable.
It's been awhile since I looked for "free or cheap XML editors" so
perhaps things have changed. In my experience, the free or cheap ones
were far from easy to use for anyone not familiar with, and comfortable
working with, XML code. Any program that provided a reasonably WYSIWYG
front-end, and was therefore easy to use, was expensive. If something
that fits my criteria has shown up in the past year or so, I would
genuinely like to hear about it.
That still applies. There are many good free editors, but they
generally require the author to work in the raw XML code.
Barriers may not be insurmountable, but they are still barriers. And
even if we all thought your idea was the way to go, *someone* would have
to lead the rest of us by the hand, in order to implement the idea.
I agree with Jean 100% here. I like DocBook, and think it's a very
powerful tool, but... it also requires a very high level of technical
expertise to work with and more importantly.. maintain it. Who develops
and maintains the exports and transforms? Do we use Ant scripts? Who
maintains the XSLTs? Do we use XML-FO for PDF output or something else?
and so on...
My concern is that the technical and edit barrier is so high with a
DocBook process that, at this point anyway, we loose too much on the
author editing side and it outweighs the benefits of DocBook.
C.
--
Clayton Cornell ccorn...@openoffice.org
OpenOffice.org Documentation Project co-lead
StarOffice - Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Hamburg, Germany
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