Using LibreOffice for Documentation

Geert Janssens geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be
Fri Sep 4 05:48:16 EDT 2015


On Thursday 03 September 2015 17:40:16 Mike Evans wrote:
> A new but related thread then.
> 
> It seems many documenters are not prepared to accept anything but a
> WYSIWIG solution, even though I feel then learning the arcanery of 
> LibreOffice is harder than learning Asciidoc. Oh well.
> 
I agree learning libreoffice is difficult as well. What makes people prefer it anyway is probably 
they already went through the effort of learning to use a word processor. Learning 
asciidoc/markdown/docbook/whatever on the other hand is an added investment.

For me personally I'm used to learning new syntax's all day and I perceive all documentation 
formats as relatively easy. So I don't care that much for myself. However I'm not the one that 
will be investing my time in improving the documentation most of the time. So I'm looking for a 
solution that is as broadly accepted as possible.

The currently active documentation writers all voiced their opinion and neither really had issues 
with docbook as such. David T. did note he'd prefer a wysiwyg solution as it would help focus on 
the writing and less on the formatting. It remains to be seen if that goal can be achieved with a 
word processor such as libreoffice.

The version management infrastructure seems to be at least as much as a hurdle to most (git 
appears to be very hard to grasp for non-developers and perhaps even for many developers as 
well).

I do appreciate Chris' offer to convert plain text snippets in bugzilla to proper (docbook) 
patches (as time permits). That should help some people get started with contributing patches.

We may consider something similar as we do with translations. We take in complete .po files 
from the translation project. We may also accept full xml documents. That would however 
require another form of management (like the TP does for po file)s: one responsible maintainer 
to coordinate with for all documentation updates to a given xml file. I'm not sure if this could 
easily be done in practice.

> LibreOffice was mentioned ealier, somewhere so I thought I'd
> experiment a bit.  I've put the results of my experiment at
> https://github.com/EvansMike/gnucash-opendocs It's not a perfect
> conversion but reasonably good.  Each file is still separate, and git
> trackable, and these are included into the master document
> "guide.odm".
> 
> Just thought I'd throw it into the mix.
> 
> Mike E

I never new something as a master document existed in libreoffice. I'm learning a lot from this 
thread :)

Other than the concerns Tommy Trussell already mentioned I worry about merging.

Can you run this test:
1. make two branches
2. Make independent changes in both branches
3. merge from one branch to the other


Regards,

Geert


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