Fedora Installation Guide writer opening

Karsten Wade kwade at redhat.com
Mon Jul 24 20:10:31 UTC 2006


On Fri, 2006-07-21 at 12:52 -0700, Robert F. Chapman wrote:

> I need to come up with a development environment that allows me to
> easily turn my plain text ruff drafts into well structured documents.
> Examples of others development environments and methods would be most
> helpful to get me started.

I'm with Paul and use Emacs + PSGML.  It is obnoxiously good at DocBook,
IMHO.  The block markup (paragraphs, lists) is simple to use, and you
learn the inline as you go.

There is, as always, a small hurdle in starting Emacs and/or DocBook,
but it is much smaller than you realize unless you've never heard of
structured text and markup languages.  But if you do HTML in any editor,
you can be doing XML DocBook in Emacs within the hour.  I know, because
that is how I got stared. :)

Our guide currently covers nxml and Emacs:

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/documentation-guide/ch-emacs-nxml.html

I haven't tried nXML in a while, but it works similarly; it is a mode
for the editor that gives extended, specific help around the type of XML
document you are writing.  That type is set, btw, in the header:

<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.4//EN"
 "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.4/docbookx.dtd" ... >

There are some notes in our guide about Vim and XML/DocBook:

http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/documentation-guide/ch-vim.html

YMMV, and maybe there are better techniques now.  If you find them, let
us know so we can update the guide[1]

[1] Add notes to the draft wiki space:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Drafts/DocumentationGuide

> Are there any members of the doc-list, located in the S.F. Bay area that
> I would be able to meet with to help get me started? I work in Sunnyvale
> Calif. and love Starbucks. I also frequent a couple of the local Linux
> Users Groups.

For efficiency sake, I think we should run with what Paul Frields is
suggesting, come to #fedora-docs on irc.freenode.net and we'll see how
far we can get you.  Even VNC is cheaper than gas. :)

That said, I am local-ish to the Bay Area; maybe we could tag a meeting
of Fedorans on top of an SVLUG meeting sometime?  I actually don't
attend, but I've been looking for an excuse to be more ambassadorial for
Fedora. :)

- Karsten
-- 
Karsten Wade, RHCE, 108 Editor    ^     Fedora Documentation Project 
 Sr. Developer Relations Mgr.     |  fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject
   quaid.108.redhat.com           |          gpg key: AD0E0C41
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