On 02/18/16 11:19, Jani Nikula wrote: > On Thu, 18 Feb 2016, Hans Verkuil <hverkuil@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> I looked at ReStructuredText and it looks like it will be a pain to convert >> the media DocBook code to that, and the main reason is the poor table support. >> The syntax for that looks very painful and the media DocBook is full of tables. > > The table support seems to be one point in favor of asciidoc over > reStructuredText [citation needed]. > >> BTW, my daily build scripts also rebuilds the media spec and it is available >> here: https://hverkuil.home.xs4all.nl/spec/media.html >> >> Also missing in ReStructuredText seems to be support for formulas (see for >> example the Colorspaces section in the spec), although to be fair standard >> DocBook doesn't do a great job at that either. > > This may be true for vanilla rst as supported by Python docutils, but > the Sphinx tool we're considering does support a lot of things through > extensions. The builtin extensions include support for rendering math > via PNG or javascript [1]. There's also support for embedded graphviz > [2] which may be of interest. > >> Now, I hate DocBook so going to something easier would certainly be nice, >> but I think it is going to be a difficult task. >> >> Someone would have to prove that going to another formatting tool will >> produce good results for our documentation. We can certainly give a few >> representative sections of our doc to someone to convert, and if that >> looks OK, then the full conversion can be done. > > It would be great to have you actively on board doing this yourself, > seeking the solutions, as you're the ones doing your documentation in > the end. > > Speaking only for myself, I'd rather prove we can produce beautiful > documentation from lightweight markup for ourselves, and let others make > their own conclusions about switching over or sticking with DocBook. > >> We have (and still are) put a lot of effort into our documentation and >> we would like to keep the same level of quality. > > We are doing this because we (at least in the graphics community) also > put a lot of effort into documentation, and we would like to make it > *better*! > > I believe switching to some lightweight markup will be helpful in > attracting more contributions to documentation. Just to be clear: I really don't like DocBook at all, so something better and easier would be very much appreciated. But good table handling is a prerequisite for us since we rely heavily on that. Regards, Hans -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
