[plug] Why use DocBook versus Word

Richard Sharpe sharpe at ns.aus.com
Sun Apr 22 11:25:54 WST 2001


Hi,

I have been engaged in a large documentation project, producing some 350
pages of technical documentation over the last few weeks, and will be going
on to produce several hundred more over the next few weeks.

I opted to use DocBook because I can put the source in CVS (and thus do
version control and have multiple people working on the documentation), it
is SGML, which is almost XML, and I have lots of control over the final
output, because I can change the stylesheets rather than changing the
document, if I want to change the look and feel.

However, it requires a fair degree of sophistication to maintain the
documentation.

Then someone suggested to me that the latest version of Word does version
control, can include documents, etc, and can generally do everything I
want. Also, with word, I can use someone straight out of high school to
maintain the documentation. Thus, there is less of a maintenance issue.

Does anyone else have any views on this?


Regards
-------
Richard Sharpe, sharpe at ns.aus.com
Samba (Team member, www.samba.org), Ethereal (Team member, www.ethereal.com)
Contributing author, SAMS Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours
Author, Special Edition, Using Samba





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