Using LaTex for Documentation

[Geert Janssens]

On Tuesday 01 September 2015 07:07:13 John Ralls wrote:
> > On Sep 1, 2015, at 3:38 AM, Ted Creedon <tcreedon at easystreet.net>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > whats wrong with Latex?
> > 
> > It works fine and produces a permuted index too
> 
> Besides being even geekier and harder to convert to ePub and HTML than
> Docbook? Probably nothing much.
> 
For me the geeky nature is not relevant.

I care about an easy way to write documentation ideally wysiwym (as opposed to wysiwyg) and 
easy to merge patches.

For latex documents I found LyX [1], which seems to be a free wysiwym editor available on all 
major platforms. I haven't found ways yet to convert from docbook to latex, so getting started 
may be a bigger hurdle here. There is dblatex but my first run failed to do the conversion. It 
may work after some more tweaking.

The conversion to epub should not be too hard. Generating pdf from latex is the natural flow of 
things and there are lots of pdf to epub convertors around. So I presume one of them will be 
able to do the job.

Html is less clear. There's a document (last modified in 2007) which documents a process to 
convert from latex to docbook [3] which would extend our current workflow. I is unfortunately 
based on lyx 1.2.0, which is ancient and in addition it brings in a lot of dependencies.

Then this page lists several latex to html converters [4]. I haven't gotten around to test them 
so I can't say much for the quality of the generated html.

Geert

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyX
    http://www.lyx.org/
[2] http://dblatex.sourceforge.net/
[3] http://www.karakas-online.de/mySGML/
[4] http://www.tex.ac.uk/FAQ-LaTeX2HTML.html