Re: Texinfo and Open Office.

Yes. The idea is to do the job of content organization, structuring, indexing, etc., and finish the job in Open Office, importing all texinfo semantics. At this stage if I need to do collaborative finishing of the document with other users who know only how to use a WYSIWYG system, it is just a question of applying a given model to texinfo imported semantics (chapter, section, index keywords, table of contents, menus, footnotes, etc.).

The fact is that actually when I need to write a document and share it in a second moment with other people via Open Office, actually I am forced to reprocess all texinfo markup. HTML import is ok, but Open Office does not recognizes footnotes and you know that articles are seldomly written without a quantity of footnotes. The same with indexes, etc.
I had a look at texinfo xml output, it seems to be quite clean and complete. But I have no idea how to use it in OOo. Unfortunately you are telling me that writing a filter is a mess... how sad.

I believe, on the other hand that, if one could enable OOo to import texinfo source in the future, it would allow WYSIWYG users to create texinfo documents using the GUI paradigma, without loss of any content and it would allow not WYSIWYG users to continue writing source without being forced to go WYSIWYG. This because texinfo "@" list should be included into the OOo XML very extended (and to some extend too cluttered) specifications.
Moreover, there is no way to write a document on a PDA and import is as an OOo document in the way you may do it by writing a texinfo source directly on the PDA and import it nativelly into OOo. Writing texinfo source is far easier than writing XML or HTML, particularly when a syntax highlighting editor is used.

Cheers,


Valentino
[email protected]

On Sun, 27 Jun 2004 18:30:42 +0200
Torsten Bronger <[email protected]> wrote:

> Halloechen!
> 
> [email protected] writes:
> 
> > PDF is not practical for collaborative creation of documents. On
> > the same time I prefer using Texinfo when creating the scratch of
> > documentation, because it has a very immediate system for content
> > creation and organization.
> 
> So you begin with Texinfo and then switch to OOo and stay with it?
> 
> > Rendering Texinfo XML or Docbook compatible with OOo, would render
> > Texinfo far more attractive for "non geek" users, because writing
> > Texinfo source is relatively simple and may be performed on any
> > computer or device, without loss of information (such as
> > hyperlinks, logical connections between parts of documents,
> > etc.). And there is no other easy to use and universal
> > documentation system capable to do it.
> 
> My experience is that any text based systems that are not at least
> in the vicinity of WYSIWYG systems are unattractive.  But be that as
> it may, wait for a working Docbook import filter.  I think anything
> else would be re-inventing the wheel (apart from the fact that
> Texinfo --> Docbook is not totally lossless).
> 
> Tschoe,
> Torsten.
> 
> -- 
> Torsten Bronger, aquisgrana, europa vetus
> 
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