Re: [SLUG] Tools for documentation.

[Chuck Dale <bug@nospam.aphid.net>]

Hi Andrew,

[..]

> > Non capito. What is a changebar?
> 
> The ability to have those little vertical lines on the LHS of the page
> indicating which parts of the document have changed since the previous
> revision.
> 
> Quite invaluable for large documents which go through multiple reviews
> and revisions.  You don't want to wade through hundreds of pages
> wondering what has changed since last time you read it.
> 
> This is very, very hard to do with a docbook/latex style toolchain. 
> Really, your editor has to be aware of (and to be able to alter) the
> markup.

Mmm interesting. I have been thinking about this since you posted about
changebars - revision control in the document. I had not thought about
it before apart from CVS.

It seems to be a requirement for production documenting environments.
But something that I had never thought about. Perhaps the expensive
tools from Arbortext provide this functionality. It is not obvious how
to do in DocBook although it would be not too difficult to customise the
DTD and stylesheets to provide the appropriate functionality.

CVS provides much more of a source-level solution - it is easy for
DocBook people to use CVS to track changes, but for someone reading a
printed copy CVS is not particularly useful unless you did some major
tool hackage and created a Bonsai mutation.

Any idea whether any of Arbortext's tools provide some of this
functionality. It seems that this could be done about from DocBook, as
long as you had tools which don't currently exist.

Jeff has posted to DocBook list on the same and will report back soon.
Just to increase his byte rate.


               [ charles hamilton dale <bug@nospam.aphid.net> ]
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