[nylug-talk] .oO or MS Office ? Neither!

[Peter C. Norton]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 10:51:30AM -0400, martin yazdzik wrote:
> Believe it or not, that is not even something most of us who are not
> professional secretaries consider.  I just presume that the pasted stuff
> either stays the same or doesn't and if I want "my" fonts, I just shade
> it out and fart around with it.  This leads me to believe that Henning
> may be right in that what we, the non-geek non secretarial e u want is
> some sort of neutral place to enter text and have the programme style
> it.

I've dealt with craploads of documentation in my time. My ideal is
something like a good wiki for writing and presenting a document
(eg. the way something like moinmoin works) and being able to spit out
a document, with included cruft like default headers, formatting,
etc. into asciidoc and have it produce pdfs (or docbook, or latex,
etc. if someone wants to tweak their output further) and I don't have
to do any more than say, as with a wiki 

== Something important ==

When you write like that and use the available styles with a
well-chosen font for the layout, documents look far better than when a
bunch of technical jeeniuses with different default style sheets in
their word, and a compulsive need to use 5 fonts, produce the same
body of documents.

Look at the presentability of the documents here and the markup that
produces them:

http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

Take a good look at the example article, where you can see the article
template as source text, as an HTML file, and as a PDF:

http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/article.txt
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/article.html
http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/article.pdf

How easy is that once you've got the toolchain set up?

-Peter

-- 
The 5 year plan:
In five years we'll make up another plan.
Or just re-use this one.