Re: documentation review tools

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

(I did a group reply: if Luke is reading the list we can dispense with
the group thing and just have it to the list, but I don't know.)

On Mon, Jan 21, 2002 at 12:51:15PM +0000 or thereabouts, Pat Costello wrote:
> > Please reply directly to me.
> > 
> > Can anybody point me to good documentation review tools?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Luke
>
> This is actually a really pertinent question. An automated proofing 
> tool that can check documentation content against rules and terminology 
> from the GDSG would be very handy indeed. 

There are GNU tools called "style" and "diction" that do part of
that, but they would certainly need some amount of hacking to do 
Gnome-specific stuff: which is probably not helpful in the short 
term. Long-term, I suppose we could cast about for someone to have 
a go. The trouble is, I have no idea whether they are written in a 
way which makes it easy to add a new set of rules or not. And we
had enough fun "forking" docbook for the png stuff: making an
alternative version of another program just as we manage to get
back to real docbook seems to be a bit of a mistake to me.

They are reimplementations of old UNIX commands, so they may
exist on Solaris and so forth anyway.

I have to say that I installed them with much enthusiasm and
then found I was very very rarely using them.

http://www.gnu.org/directory/diction.html

Telsa