Hi, I think we should go with docbook.
There are a couple of important reasons for this. It allows us to provides our users an out-of-the-box way for generating the documentation (vs. a high threshold for installing LaTeX). It also allows us to integrate the user's guide into our continuous integration. Just these two things are enough to justify a switch. Docbook is a mature technology. Adam has figured already out how to produce the formats we want. And Adam makes a valid point that we are not a publishing house. Besides that the docbook to latex transformation gives us always a way back to a LaTeX generated PDF (for those who care and have a LaTeX installed).
I don't mind writing documentation in XML. In fact I would appreciate the good tool support that comes in its wake. Sure there could be better formats for doing this than XML but for our purpose it is totally OK.
The LaTeX to html transformation is a weak spot for LaTeX but very important to us (more important than to a publishing house ;)). Adam went through the big pains to make the LaTeX html generation from useless to OK. I had never tackled this issue because I was afraid to dive into this very time consuming and undocumented area of LaTeX. And even after this huge amount of energy Adam has invested, there are still flaws and significant limitations, which is frustrating.
We could start with the switch after the 0.5 release. - Hans On Oct 30, 2008, at 8:58 PM, Adam Murdoch wrote: -- Hans Dockter Gradle Project lead http://www.gradle.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, please visit: http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
