Re: Documentation Desparation
Hi Tim and all, I agree your proposal, (La)TeX, because I think it has some capability to share document in community with SCM tools(such as CVS, Subversion, git). It makes clear in the points bellow: * Who committed the change. * When it was committed. * Where was the changepoint(diff) For these reason, plain text with some formalism would be prefered than binary file like PDF. Otherwise, (La)TeX needs some experience for all people to get the layout they want. I had once tried XML format to share translation document in a community. But one of the members corrupt the XML by MS-Word. I think there is no silver bullet to describe text with figures in plain text. How about Wiki or Google docs? They can share document with layout among community. Recent wiki eingine can out put PDF as necessary. Google apps is also proprietary software but it is easy to edit for everyone. Cheers, Shinji On Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:27:49 -0300 Tim Cook <timothywayne.cook@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi All, > > Over the past several years I have discussed this issue with Tom > Beale; > on mailing lists, off mailing lists and in person. > > The issue is that Framemaker is a proprietary and basically non > standard > document format. I fully understand that Tom enjoys the desktop > publishing capabilities that it gives him and that he is familiar with > the application. > > However, we the "open content" community end up with a proprietary > format (Framemaker) and a dead-end format (PDF) for specifications > that > are advertised as being open and available. > > It is almost the the ultimate sarcastic humor (on the scale of Monty > Python) that here we are trying to deliver computable healthcare > information and our own specifications are locked up in these two > formats. We cannot manipulate them into any kind of help files in > order > to integrate them into an application and god forbid we think about > machine translation into other languages. > > So, I have to ask myself, as well as all of the members of the openEHR > community. What is wrong with the international, open standard for > document layout; (La)Tex? It seems to work well for all major > publishers, why can't it work for openEHR? > > Why do we not insist on our documentation being in a format that is > more > useful to us as a broad and open community? > > Thanks for listening. > > --Tim > > > > > > > > -- > *************************************************************** > Timothy Cook, MSc > > LinkedIn Profile:http://www.linkedin.com/in/timothywaynecook > Skype ID == (upon request) > Academic.Edu Profile: http://uff.academia.edu/TimothyCook > > You may get my Public GPG key from popular keyservers or > from this link http://timothywayne.cook.googlepages.com/home > -- KOBAYASHI, Shinji <skoba@moss.gr.jp>