[freeroleplay] Re: Document Format Question (was Re: Vanilla FantasyWorlds)

[Bryce Harrington <bryce@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 26 Jul 2003, James Jensen wrote:
> Bryce Harrington wrote:
>
> >* Decide the preferred documentation approach.  If all the content can
> >  be kept in a common format it'll make maintenance be straightforward.
> >  I would recommend doing it in plain text, because that way none of
> >  your contributors need to learn anything or install any software.  You
> >  can use or make tools to put the text into TeX or DocBook or whatnot.
> >
> >
>
> What about making both plain text and HTML the preferred formats? The
> one is easy to convert to the other, and HTML is very easy to learn.
> Would this cause many problems?

You can actually generate formatted HTML from plain text, by a variety
of tools such as EtText, Text::WikiFormat, Structured Text, and the
like.  This is the approach I tend to do, and I've written some software
to help with this, that I could point you at if you're interested.

You're right that HTML is easy to learn, and it's a fairly decent format
for documentation.  I especially like how easy it is to embed images in
it, compared with LaTeX or DocBook.  There can be a lot of variability
in what people use it for; for instance if people use a WYSIWYG HTML
editor the output can be very thick with tags, to the point that it's
not easy for anyone else to edit.  I think there are some HTML-to-PDF
converters, but I don't have experience with any of them; certainly this
is something you'd want to doublecheck, since you're certainly going to
want to put the result into a printable form at some point.

Bryce

• References:
  • [freeroleplay] Document Format Question (was Re: Vanilla FantasyWorlds)
    • From: James Jensen

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[freeroleplay] Document Format Question (was Re: Vanilla FantasyWorlds)

[freeroleplay] Re: Document Format Question (was Re: Vanilla FantasyWorlds)