Workbook uploaded to wiki -- anyone know Docbook or LaTeX?

Maura Dailey maura at eclipse.ncsc.mil
Mon Apr 1 20:13:06 UTC 2013


On 04/01/2013 12:20 PM, Shawn Wells wrote:
> Hey Guys,
>
>     The workbook used from the March session is now uploaded to the wiki:
> https://fedorahosted.org/scap-security-guide/
>
>     Reference "See a Workbook..." link under the "To see how this 
> works" section.
>
>     Goal is still to convert to docbook or some other multi-author 
> friendly format. Does anyone have experience in those formats (I 
> don't!) and willing to lend a hand/point me in the right direction? 
> Right now the source content is in ODT.
>
> -Shawn
> _______________________________________________
> scap-security-guide mailing list
> scap-security-guide at lists.fedorahosted.org
> https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/scap-security-guide

I'll start off by saying that at a high level, DocBook and LaTeX give 
document authors extremely similar development environments. Someone 
that knows one format can probably pick up the other. However, the goals 
of both are a little different. LaTeX is more powerful for formatting 
documents because it can tap into its TeX roots, but a lot of the power 
it gives document authors would be wasted here (fine control over text 
formatting, the ability to easily embed figures and equations, etc.). 
DocBook is more portable, because it doesn't have any formatting built 
in. Formatting must be done through XSLT and other transforms, just like 
any other XML document. I think DocBook makes the most sense for this 
project because developing in DocBook will remove formatting from the 
picture. Also, many Linux distributions are already using DocBook for 
documention, including Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu.

I haven't written anything from scratch in DocBook, but I've edited 
existing files. It's fairly clean to edit, but much wordier than HTML. 
Since you're at Red Hat, you should ask your documentation team if they 
have any tool recommendations or stylesheets for you to try. How 
horrible is LibreOffice's save as docbook option, by the way? I've seen 
a few references online where people have used it successfully, although 
they usually claim there is some cleanup work that has to be done before 
it's fit for publication. In theory, it should be possible to get a very 
clean translation, since the Open Office format actually is XML.

- Maura Dailey


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