Re: Is LyX usable ?

[Mark Gray <markgray iago nac net>]

Karl Eichwalder <ke@suse.de> writes:

> Mark Gray <markgray@iago.nac.net> writes:
> 
>> A good tool to do this would certainly take away any objections to
>> DocBook I have -- the Gnome Help Browser does not even have a search
>> function built in.  (SGML/XML is exciting, but until I see Free tools
>> that take advantage of that theoretical potential I am going to remain
>> sceptical -- it looks like a lot of extra work just to produce html.)

> Even if you don't see the benefits for the moment the future will show
> them :)  

That's as maybe :-)

> Unfortunately, you continue to mix all things -- if you don't
> belief in SGML just leave it alone.  Texinfo is a nice hack to produce
> high quality software documention with minimal effort (thanks to Karl
> Berry, RMS, and friends).  But it has its limitations.

The thing is that gnome wants to standardize on sgml and I want the
software I am producing to fit in with their documentation standards.

>> I have always believed that info got a horrible reputation because it
>> clung to the complex counter-intuitive key-bindings that it uses for
>> so long

> You're mixing all things again.  There's Texinfo, the file format; and
> there are tools to read Info files.  You don't need to write Texinfo if
> you want to produce Info files.  The Python documetation was written in
> LaTeX and converted to Info.

All I am interested in is the end result -- documentation that a
programmer or user can conveniently search for an answer in and
DocBook does not produce this at the moment -- you are forced to read
through the entire document when all you want is the answer to a
simple question.  The complex structuring that sgml markup uses is
totally unused for any purpose at the moment -- as enticing as the
theoretical potential may be, I am at a loss as how to take any
advantage of that structure myself (it is not my field :-).

(When you mentioned using SGML/XML tools to search I had hopes someone
would point out which ones to use, because I am merely interested in
getting the needed information out of the documentation, and have no
real interest in how that documentation is created -- I love (La)TeX
but I am not going to use it if SGML is the standard, no matter how
inelegant SGML is compared to (La)TeX.)

> But you're right the recent standalone Info reader is a pretty useful
> tool.

If they had changed their key-bindings five years ago, no one would
have even bothered looking for something different.