Documentation file format

[Christian Stimming]

Am Samstag, 14. Dezember 2013, 13:58:43 schrieb John Ralls:
> >>>> Since no-one has mentioned it yet, what about asciidoc?  It's much
> >>>> simpler that the xml we have now, is very easy to learn, it is plain
> >>>> text, it handles multi-part books, and AFAIK the current docbook can be
> >>>> converted to asciidoc without *too* much effort.
> > 
> > I consider asciidoc also not very accessible for non-programmer writers.
> > IMHO a new file format for our documentation should be much easier
> > accessible for documentation writers. Those people are by definition
> > almost surely no programmers. I don't think the mindset of asciidoc meets
> > their approach to writing documentation. So: no, I don't think asciidoc
> > is an improvement of the current docbook format. Sorry.
> > 
> 
> Well, the friendliest format for documenters is Microsoft Word, since pretty
> much any word processor will read it. We’ll get a lot of noise from the
> Open Source fanatics though.  Shouldn’t be too hard to make a toolchain to
> convert it into whatever distribution formats we want. Complexity there
> isn’t an issue because devs handle releases.

But any format of the OpenOffice / LibreOffice variants would do as well. I 
don't consider Microsoft Word (btw: which version? 2005 doc? 2012 docx? or 
whatever?) in itself a better alternative, but any WYSIWYG processor that is 
reasonably well available on the various OS is fine.

Regards,

Christian