Press release on publican?

[John Babich]

On Feb 16, 2008 2:58 PM, Jonathan Roberts
<jonathan.roberts.uk at googlemail.com> wrote:
> How about something like:
<snipped and re-written slightly>

Free software is becoming increasingly popular with non-technical
users and, as a result, good documentation is becoming more important.
The greatest barrier to achieving good, free documentation has not
been a lack of interested contributors, but the difficulty of the
tools required to create and manage regularly updated and complex
documents.

Thankfully things have just got a lot easier: Publican has arrived.

Red Hat's documentation team has been using this tool for several
years, which automates the process of creating all the files needed to
begin a new document, as well as exporting the finished content into
many of the most common formats, including HTML and PDF. Now they've
opened it up to the world and it is being hosted by the Fedora
Project, whose own documentation team is set to adopt it.

Jared Smith, a member of the Fedora Documentation Project, spent some
time talking about his first experiences with Publican: "I probably
spent at least a good twenty or thirty hours (or more) setting up the
infrastructure for the last DocBook project I started …mostly setting
up files (and the various links between them), tweaking the Makefiles,
etc. It was not exactly my definition of the word 'fun'.

"So on a whim last night, I figured I'd start checking out Publican
and see how long it would take. In less than 15 minutes, I had
Publican installed and an existing DocBook document ported over to it
(the new revision of the Software Management Guide, as part of the
Fedora Documentation Project). You can see the HTML output of my
endeavor here,
http://jsmith.fedorapeople.org/software-management-guide, complete
with Fedora branding and everything."

You can find out how to get started with Publican at this link:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/publican.

Once you have done that, drop by the Fedora Documentation team,
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/Join, and find out how you
can help.

The Fedora Documentation Project Team