tlug: (La)TeX, SGML, or ... ?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "jb" == Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com> writes:

    jb> I need to pick a Linux/Unix-based tool to develop a site
    jb> procedures manual.  My criteria are that it should be easily
    jb> editable (mostly by me, but at some point by other members of
    jb> the engineering department as well), that it should be
    jb> viewable and editable graphically, and if the format is one

"Editable graphically."  Arg.  Min.  I mean, sai-tei.  Kudaranai.  Oh
well, there goes the neighborhood, even Jonathan's succumbed.

    jb> for which a (good) convert-to-HTML tool exists, that's a plus.

    jb> The choices appear to be Tex or LaTeX, SGML, or create
    jb> Postscript files.

Forget Postscript, the only people in their right minds who compose
large documents directly in Postscript are all computers.  Hand-
written Postscript is going to be either Ugly or unmaintainable.

There's no point in TeX, go directly to LaTeX.

I would say XML (a derivative of SGML) is probably the markup language 
of choice.  However, AFAIK there are no WYSIWYG editors for XML or any 
variant of SGML except HTML.  All SGML variants submit docilely to
[X]Emacs + psgml.el in my experience, which gives you menu-driven
editing but not graphical WYSIWYG.

Linux docs have historically been written in linuxdoc-SGML, which is a 
pretty good recommendation I should think.  Debian has its own
variant, debiandoc-sgml, but this uses a non-standard (ie, non James
Clark) SGML engine AFAIK.

    jb> Has anyone used LyX to make LaTeX files?  Do you think this
    jb> would meet my needs fairly well?

It should.  There are two main potential hitches I can see.  (1) You
don't like any of the formats supplied with LyX.  I don't think it is
easily extensible by non-TeX hackers.  Either LaTeX or an SGML variant 
would be more easily extensible, I think.  (2) LaTeX2HTML (the main
tool for converting LaTeX to online docs) may not like
machine-generated LaTeX very much.  You may not like LaTeX2HTML's
output (I despise it); I don't think it is very easily customizable.

    jb> Also, I may eventually want to put screenshots into the
    jb> manual, but these will probably not be present in the first
    jb> version (s).

I don't know if LyX permits this, all of the other options do.

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