[Gllug] Interactive Documentation.

[Joel Bernstein]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 05:05:40PM +0100, Peter Childs wrote:
> On 21/08/06, Richard Jones <rich at annexia.org> wrote:
> >> Why is it that Linux users always seam to go for text editors I'm a vi
> >> fan but if you want the man in the street to use it you NEED to go for
> >> WYSIWYG approach I think if I spoke to the office staff about it they
> >> would suggest Word (and I would give them openoffice which is not
> >> really suitable for large documents of this style)
> >
> >I'm having the misfortune at the moment of collaborating on a book
> >using Word's "track changes" feature, which is a sort of version
> >control abomination.  It's lame that this is the most "powerful"
> >document control that most people have access to.
> >
> 
> I totally aggree, its quite straight forward for any document over 5
> pages that keeps changing Word (or OpenOffice) is not the correct
> tool.
> 
> However a WYSIWYG tool that can handle long documents with proper
> version control and hyperlinks (for glossaries, contence etc) in them
> that work are non-exsistant and hence normal users are stuck using
> Word which is extremly sad. Its simular to the fact that I've seen
> many people running large complex databases in Excel (worse still Word
> Tables)!

http://www.writeboard.com/

Isn't that exactly what you need? Supports collaboration, multiple
versions, etc. I've not used it enough to know whether you can do the
hyperlinking and contents tables etc, but it should be worth a look.

It's free, web-based, and built on Ruby On Rails.

> If I had a cunning plan to write one I would but I've got no idea how
> it would work.

I'd say you would start by building the server-side components (ie, the
versioning etc) and then get working with Dojo
(http://dojotoolkit.org/) to build your responsive UI on the client,
using XMLHttpRequest calls to handle the communication with the backend
asynchronously.

If you're interested in collaborating on something like this, give me a
shout off-list. I'd prefer to work in Perl (eg, using Catalyst) but I'm
open to suggestions.

/joel
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