Re: Is there a need for a hard copy OpenBSD documentation project?

[Fredrik Henbjork <frehe491@student.liu.se>]

Luke Seubert <lseubert@radix.net> wrote:
> STeve Andre' on 09/01/2000 9:52 PM scribbled:
> 
> > Unless you are pouring over ALL the docs, how many are you apt to  look at
> > before they are outdated?
> > 
> This is an excellent point  - how in the world to keep the documentation up
> to date?  OpenBSD has a pretty aggressive release schedule!

A possible solution would be to convert all documents to SGML/XML format,
maintain them in that format, and then generate other formats from these
sources. Then one could just generate postscript/pdf via (La)TeX and print
out the documentation one wants in a nice hardcopy format. Generation of
man pages and HTML would also be a very simple thing to do. Since this
solution would result in one single documentation tree it would be very
easy to track changes. It would also have the benefit of providing very
nice ways to generate customized documentation, since you could cut and
paste among the SGML/XML sources and then combine the content with your
own (La)TeX templates. Choosing a SGML/XML template should not be too
hard since there are a lot of examples to look at. Then it would be
easy to write scripts, in Python for example, to parse the current
manpages and HTML and convert them to the SGML/XML format. I could
possibly take the responsibility to write all the neccessary scripts,
but I would like some more discussion on the subject first. :-)

-- 
Fredrik Henbjork

http://o112.ryd.student.liu.se