[boost] Copy editing documentation - SOC project

From: Nava Whiteford (nwhiteford_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-03-12 09:22:21

Matthias Schabel <boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> > FYI, QuickBook already has the reverse-lit feature. It lets you
> > "import" code snippets from actual code. Rene and I are using it
> > right now to great effect.
> 
> I have to say, as a non-CS person, I'm finding it hard to even keep
> track of the differences between DocBook, BoostBook, and QuickBook,
> much less figure out how to accomplish anything with them... Just as
> a side note, given that documentation is already generally regarded as
> one of the most painful parts of library development, I think it  
> would be
> a good idea for Boost to standardize on one system or another and
> then provide a good tutorial on how to use it... For example, after
> browsing all the QuickBook documentation I could find, I still have
> no idea how to implement the code snippet import feature you
> described; 

After working with Gennadiy to copy edit some documentation I'd have to 
agree. Everyone has there own preference, Word, Docbook, Latex etc. but 
you need some common standard if your going to working collaboratively on 
documentation, ideally it should be a format the preserves markup in some 
explicit way.

I know it might be an unpopular suggestion, but have you thought of moving 
the Boost documentation to a wiki based system? Even if only certain 
members are provided access I think it would be better than what you 
currently have, most people are happy enough learning to edit text in a 
wiki. Googling even gives some information on a wiki to DocBook 
converter... http://www.tldp.org/wt2db/

> furthermore, as far as I can tell, there is no .qbk source
> in Boost (from recent CVS-HEAD) that I could use to try to emulate
> your Spirit documentation (assuming that is the documentation that
> uses this reverse-lit import, which I can't know a priori). Finally,  
> while
> there appears to be some way to have DocBook output LaTeX, it
> isn't clear to me that there is any way to have it parse and process
> LaTeX source in, for example, the way that Doxygen does so that
> you can get images of typeset equations in the HTML output. Maybe
> it's possible, but it is certainly far from obvious, and the amount of
> time I would have to invest learning a completely new system hardly
> seems to justify the potential benefit. Anyway, sorry for the rant - it
> just doesn't seem like this should be this painful...
> 
> Matthias