GnuCash Concept Guide

[Chris Shoemaker]

On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 11:24:46AM +0900, Bengt Thuree wrote:
> 
> On Fr, 2006-04-07, 09:32, David Grant skrev:
> 
> > But why do you even need docbook in the first place? Why not just use
> > mediawiki?
> >
> > I definitely recommend putting all the documentation in some form of
> > wiki or drupal form so that anyone can edit pages easily.
> >
> 
> Ok, I am definitely not an expert in this area :)
> Anyway, having it on a wiki format would be great for the easy of updating
> it. You have to be online to do serious work though.
> 
> But docbook is the standard format for documentation as far as I
> understand, and after checking the links it seems to me that the various
> tools to convert from wiki to docbook is at beta stage, and with not
> perfect result yet.
> 
> DocBook can also be formated to a number of different formats, which is
> not easy to do from mediawiki.
> 
> I can imagine a lot of people would like to have a small hardcopy
> (printed) manual next to them when they are using GnuCash for the first
> few times, or just simply checking up on the features and how to do
> things.
> 
> The other things with anyone editing the files. Where will we store the
> sample databases? As it is now, it seems we will have one database for
> each chapter and store it in SVN together with the various chapters.
> 
> I agree though, updating/creating the document through a media like
> mediawiki would be a lot easier. Am not quite sure that the end result
> would be suitable though. Or?
> 
> A possible compromise would be to start the work in MediaWiki, and then
> move it (manually perhaps) to DocBook format and possible "remove" the
> MediaWiki entry, since we can only have one original. This would give us
> the DocBook advantages, with MediaWiki creating advantages. Yes, not fun
> with the manual conversion to DocBook though.

I think this is a pretty good compromise.  I would say that it's a
firm requirement to have the docs available in some offline form.
DocBook is a very appropriate format for that.  If the wiki->docbook
conversion is workable, great.  If not, I think the advantage of wider
editing of the docs out-weighs the disadvantage of having to manually
reformat them for offline use.

One question: does our use of MediaWiki now, instead of Drupal,
preclude us from using a wiki->docbook conversion tool in the future?

Another option we _might_ be willing to settle for would be static
html docs, which I suspect are easier to produce from a wiki.

-chris