New printing concept of wine

[Toby Haynes]

On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, pfrostie at yahoo.com wrote:

> why write something in a format you have to translate to read?  if abiword,
> staroffice, or even koffice had support for it i could understand but as it
> stands it seems like a waste of time.

Flexibility.
 
> the whole point of writting the docs is to help those that are new to 
> something.  Why stack more on the plate.

Not everyone wants their documentation in the same format. SGML, LaTeX and
DocBook allow the user (or the developer) to simultaneously release the docs in
HTML, postscript, plain text, pdf, info pages, man pages and so forth without
any extra work (beyond a couple of lines in a makefile). 

There are times when I want a printed manual that can sit by my desk as I
develop. There are times when I want to know the page numbers of all the
occurences of some text or phrase not referenced in the index. There are times
when hyperlinked text allows rapid discovery of key information. Intermediate
formats give that flexibility.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes
-- 

Toby Haynes
The views and opinions expressed in this message are my own, and do
not necessarily reflect those of IBM Canada.