[SciPy-dev] Re: Accessible SciPy (ASP) project

[Francesc Alted]

A Dimarts 02 Novembre 2004 06:33, Prabhu Ramachandran va escriure:
> PDF documents though.  By the looks of it, tbook seems better than
> docbook.

I've been a relatively happy user of tbook for some time (3 years now). For
me, the good thing about tbook is its amazing capability to convert docs to
other formats, including LaTeX, DocBook, RTF (without images) and HTML. I
traditionally have used the native LaTeX and HTML backends with gives great
quality docs as a result. You can have a look at these examples:

http://pytables.sourceforge.net/doc/pytablesmanual.pdf (LaTeX backend)
http://pytables.sourceforge.net/html-doc/usersguide.html (native HTML backend)

Lately, however, I've been playing with converting tbook sources to DocBook
and then to HTML, and I have to say that the result is much better to my
eyes that using the native backend:

http://pytables.sourceforge.net/html-doc/index.html

IMO, another thing that makes tbook worth of consideration is that its
learning curve is much smoother than DocBook because the set of primitives
is quite less reduced. I haven't tried the math mode at all, but by looking
at examples (using the native HTML backend), it seems great:

http://tbookdtd.sourceforge.net/datb/datb.html

[Beware, you will need some browser that support XHTML 1.1 to display well
that page]

The main drawback, in my opinion, is a betterable support of images (in the
sense of respecting the original sizes). Also, as it is XML-oriented (like
DocBook), it may require some effort to be used to write start and end tags
(you know, the <chapter> ... </chapter> stuff), although by using the XML
mode in emacs works very nice to me.

My two cents,

-- 
Francesc Alted