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As a developer I really don't like writing documentation but when I have to I'd like to make the process as painless as possible.
The problem with Word is that it constantly gets in my way. I worry more about the layout than about the actual content ... that's why I'd like to get rid of Word.
Ideally I'd like to write my content and then 'compile' it into a document.
I've heard of LaTeX but I don't have any experience with it whatsoever. Would this be the right technology for the job? What editor (Windows) should I use? Is it a good idea to start with LyX?
EDIT: I'm not asking about documenting code (I use Sandcastle for that).
Update 2014:
We have now switched to GFM (GitHub Flavored Markdown).
It's really easy to work with.
Write code & documentation in the same IDE!
Everything can be versioned!
Get great output either as raw txt, html or pdf!
My solution to this was to invest some time in creating a decent Word Template for myself.
The important thing to do is make sure you have a Style defined for everything you can put in the document.
Once you have all the Styles defined and all of the document content tagged with the correct Style instead of formatted in an ad hoc fashion, you'll be surprised how easy it is to produce good looking Word documents quickly every time.
The wider problem here is that everyone spends hours in Word and yet it is very rare for companies to invest in Word training. At some point you have to bite the bullet and take the time to teach yourself how to use it properly, just like you would with any other tool.
Anything you can do with LyX you can do with LaTeX. LaTeX is suitable for all sorts of things; it has been used for everything from manuals to lecture slides to novels.
I think LaTeX is probably worth looking into as an option; if you've ever wanted to "code" for your word processor, LaTeX is for you. At the simplest level you can define new commands to do things for you, but there's a lot of power there. And the output looks really neat.
In my opinion, LyX is fantastic in certain circumstances, handy in others, and occasionally just gets in your way. I think it should be seen as a productivity booster for LaTeX. In other words, learn to use LaTeX before trying LyX. Both are of course free and available for Windows, though the learning curve is quite steep compared with MS Word. For long documents, or plenty of similar documents, LaTeX/LyX is probably a worthwhile investment.
I've found that wikis can be good for this. Find a wiki you like that lets you do a bit of formatting, but nothing really heavy. Ideally it should let you format code easily too - to be honest, the markdown available on SO is probably a good start.
That way:
You have change tracking built-in (assuming a decent wiki)
You can edit from anywhere
Everyone always sees the same documentation (instant distribution)
You can concentrate on content instead of formatting
You could write your documentation using your own XML format and then transform it into any format with XSL (e.g. PDF via FOP+XSL-FO ).
See also the DocBook XML format.
LaTeX is an extremely powerful tool and might well be overkill here as it is designed for scientific/mathematical literature. It has a (relatively) steep learning curve and can be tricky to coax to do exactly as you want if you're new to it. I LOVE LaTeX, but it is not really a general purpose word processor.
Have you considered OpenOffice instead?
LaTeX is really a very powerful language if you need to write documents.
Perhaps you can try texmaker, a cross-platform LaTeX editor:
Texmaker is a clean, highly
configurable LaTeX editor with good
hot key support and extensive Latex
documentation. Texmaker integrates
many tools needed to develop
documents with LaTeX, in just one
application. It has some nice
features such as syntax highlighting,
insertion of 370 mathematical symbols
with only one click, and "structure
view" of the document for easier
navigation.
What about using HTML? This way you could then publish the documentation if there will be need for many people to access it from many places.
Despite all efforts and reasonable expectation I don't think Word Processing has been "solved" yet.
My response to what I also personally find a deeply frustrating experience with MS Word is to avoid it altogether and use an auto-documenting tool like GhostDoc to generate XML from what I've already written in the code (DRY!) and deal with the XML from an XSLT based intranet site or similar later.
Are you talking about documenting your actual code? If so, I recommend Doxygen for unmanaged code and Sandcastle for managed code. Both will compile your help or build it as a website for you.
Both applications will read special tags above functions / classes / variables and compile that into the help.
Well I've never found anything wrong with MS-Word in the first place. (i.e if you take the time to know how to use it effectively). OpenOffice indeed is an amazing & credible free alternative - but then if you hate MS Word for layout related problems, the same problem is gonna occur with OpenOffice too.
Never tried the Latex system myself, but have heard its good for scientific work. I think using some HTML WYSIWYG editor would be best for you, if you want to just focus on the content.
I considered a wiki, but I decided to go with a modified Markdown notation, for the simple reason, that a wiki's content isn't easily exported and distributed outside of the wiki itself, while the Markdown can be rendered into HTML.
Answer to chris' question about my workflow: I write the documentation with a Notepad-like application (TextWrangler, only because of its word-wrapping feature) in its raw Markdown format. Then I have a small localhost documentation website with my modified Markdown parser (extended for a few features and a bit more HTML-oriented functionality) that checks for the timestamps for the documentation files - if a file has been updated, it parses that file into HTML, and stores the file in a cache.
This way I'm able to edit the source documentation on my desktop, and just press F5 in my browser to see the results immediately.
I haven't got around to trying it yet, but I've always thought AsciiDoc would be good for this kind of thing.
If you want something simpler than LaTeX, you can have a look at ReStructured Text
Read this book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pragmatic_Programmer . There is some idee fixe inside, so that documentation should be built automatically. Think about using your IDE for this, or look for some additional tools. Most modern languages support generating documentation as you write the code. This can simply maintain your doc in touch with latest changes in the code.
I prefer to use a RTF editor which is a lot less clunkier than words. This way the formatting and all the headers/footers nonsense will not take up half your time. Wordpad has worked for me on several occasions. I'm stuck with Word for now though :(
there are a lot of possible ways:
embedded documentation, e.g. javadoc: good for describing APIs, not so good for the "big picture"
plain html: can be checked in under version control, a definite plus
a wiki, e.g. confluence -- great for collaboration, but has version control different from your source
LaTeX or somesuch: better suited for books or papers than typical documentation; support for graphics is cumbersome
an Office clone, e.g. OpenOffice: mostly the same as Word+Visio, but open source, with a nicer document format
I usually document the software structure (the "metaphors" of a project, component interrelations, external systems) up front, using Visio, in "freeform" UML. These are then embedded in confluence, which can be converted to PDF if someone wants a printout.
LyX
LyX is a WYSIWYM front end to LaTeX: You get the convenience of a document processor (somewhat similar to Word) with the consistency and power of LaTeX: It doesn't get in your way and can do a lot of things that professional writers need.
Note: The correct answer for you really depends on your way of thinking --- we can't decide this for you. This answer simply shows an excellent choice if you think of documentations as documents and want something similar to Word (where Word is good) that doesn't suck as Word (where Word is bad for programmers).
But many programmers think of documentation differently and hence prefer different metaphors. I myself had the same problem years ago, worked with LaTeX (as I am a mathematician), found LyX and finally settled on a Wiki/Source system that I wrote myself.
Vim is the solution for anything that means writing plain text in the most efficient possible way. If you need formatting, then use XML, Latex or something similar (in Vim).
Vim changed my life!
Simple answer: LaTeX sounds like just what you are looking for.
I use it for writing documentation myself. I will never go back to Word if I have the option.
At phc, we started with latex, then moved to docbook, and have settled (permanently I hope) on Restructured Text/Sphinx.
Latex was chosen because we are academics, and latex is the tool of choice. I believe it didn't generate good enough HTML.
Docbook was chosen for power, but it was very unwieldy. It put us off writing any documentation: code had to be manually formatted, we kept forgetting the syntax, and it was difficult to read. The learning curve was also steep.
Finally, we moved to reST, using sphinx, and that was a great decision. Documentation is now very easy to write, and both PDF and HTML versions look beautiful (though the PDF could do with some customization). Its very easy to customize too.
The best bit about reST though, is that its human readable in source form. That is a wonderful advantage. I've switched to using reST for all my stuff now, especially anything over the web (except of course academic papers, where one would be foolish to use anything but latex).
You may want to look into doxygen at http://www.doxygen.nl/, see their nice examples. In this case, the documentation is presented by tags in comments in the source.
Another option would be to use an online system like trac from http://trac.edgewall.org/ which is a wiki/doc/issuetracking system that lives on top of subversion.
Related
I have been looking for some time now, and I decided to try some crowd sourcing.
I have searched (Googled) the answer and looked through Stack Overflow for some time now, and I cannot find a proper and relatively easy way of created DOCX documents via Perl.
I want to create a DOC file, and since DOCX is XML based, I was guessing that would be an easier way to achieve this.
I located a RTF::Writer module but its very limited in its capabilities.
There are more than one such library for PHP, and other languages, but I cannot use that, unfortunately.
I am not running on a Windows environment so I cannot use anything that would integrate with Office, in addition I don't want to start bundling Office with my product.
I am open to suggestions, but please provide sensible ones :) i.e. no, you are scr*wed DOCX is impossible.
Here is what I tried:
1) Take an existing DOCX, and modify the XML directly, all I achieved via this is caused Word to crash :) apparently Word is very sensitive on its attribute order
2) Googled for answers and I found some, like Win32::Word::Writer which only works on Windows and requires OLE and Office
3) Found a lot of posts from 2010, that say its impossible, well almost 4 years have passed, probably something is out there that can do it
4) Looked for commercial solutions, couldn't find one, I found FOP which is able to create RTF, which is pretty close, but it lacks a lot of the styling I would like to use
5) A lot of things (code and modules) that allow extracting data from DOCX, but nothing that can create one, weird
6) Found abandoned code like OpenOffice::OODoc which stopped being written in 2010, and of course requires OpenOffice to be installed, and potentially also requires a non-headless (i.e. requires a GUI system)
Thanks guys for any answers :}
One cheat that I've used in the past is to output HTML with a ".doc" file name.
This gives you less fine-grained control over the document formatting, but may be sufficient for your use case.
The closest I've ever managed is to generate an OpenOffice document and then use that to export as .docx (in headless mode).
You need some fonts installed, but no GUI for this. I use OpenOffice::OODoc, and it's enough to let me open up an existing document and add text/pictures.
The OpenOffice (LibreOffice) export process is not 100% reliable, but I've never been able to get a simple, repeatable test case to reproduce it - just hangs occasionally. I add a timer to kill the process and let it retry.
Not a perfect situation, I'm afraid and I hope someone has a better solution.
There are quite a number of modules on CPAN relating to the creation and manipulation of .pdf files, and I'm hoping this community can save me some time going down blind alleys.
I am looking to create .pdf files from scratch, with only simple formatting such as bold/italic and left/right/center justify. Being able to use a template file would nice, from an MVC perspective, but if the best module doesn't support that, I'm ok. I want the best module for my narrow problem set.
Edit: let's add the constraint that it does have to be a Perl module, if not a pure-perl solution. Thanks for answers thus far!
Update: PDF creation is one difficult problem to decide how to approach. In addition to the good suggestions here, there seems to be about 1,000 different ways to solve this, and knowing which solution(s) to invest your time in is a real challenge. It is easy to acquire dependencies on outside executables in the process of building this solution, which is why I have been favoring doing everything in Perl if possible.
I went down the road of trying to use PDF::Create but found it too limiting. You have to give coordinates to place each string of text and there is no built-in concept of text wrapping... this is all work you have to do. Impossible amount of overhead for my task.
I am now using PDF::API2, which is much more powerful than PDF::Create, but still demands the PDF be assembled at a troublingly low level. Luckily, there is some help online. See Rick Measham's excellent PDF::API2 tutorial with accompanying text_block() subroutine, which thankfully does the heavy lifting on the text wrap problem.
Unless you see another update here, this is the solution that ended up working for me.
I'm the author of the CPAN module CAM::PDF which is definitely not the best tool for this job -- it's designed for high-performance editing, not creating.
Among free PDF creation libraries, I like PDF::API2 the best. It has a very rich feature set and good encryption support (inspired by CAM::PDF I might add!) The author, Alfredo, manages a popular email list. People sometimes complain about documentation, but I've found it to be adequate.
Among commercial libraries, I've had good experiences with pdflib.
Three modules for creating PDF come to mind (in no particular order)....
PDF::API2
PDF:::Create
PDF::Template
PDF::Template gives you that template option you maybe hankering for? PDF::Create seems more straightforward (at least from the docs) and may meet your "simple formatting" requirement more adequately.
However if you want to know what the "community" thinks then only PDF::API2 gets a rating on CPAN Ratings coming in with 4 out of 5 stars overall score.
Hope that helps.
PS. Disclaimer: I've not used any of these modules. In past I've always gone for XML/XSLT/XSL-FO using Apache FOP with Perl being used to create the initial XML data. This can be an overkill for something small and not always ideal if you want to embed PDF generation into your Perl app.
PPS. So I'll also be looking at these CPAN PDF modules at some point in near future!
Does it have to be a Perl module? You could always use LaTeX and convert that to PDF. Not quite as straight-forward, but it is another option.
G'day Marcus,
Glad you found the tutorial. I do a lot of work in PDF::API2, so if there's anything I can help with, just let me know.
Naturally, I recommend PDF::API2!
There's a guy Jay Hannah, who's currently turning the text block into a module for CPAN that does exactly what you want: bold, italic, etc. If you check the mailing list, you'll see his posts at the top.
Cheers!
Rick Measham
Yeah, tough to answer without knowing exactly what your constraints are. If pure-Perl is not a necessity, I'd be inclined towards DocBook.
The initial markup you'll generate can be very simple XML; and the transformation requires just an XSL processor and shelling out to something like Apache's FOP.
how to save a online pdf file using perl?
http://www.nwcc.bc.ca/FNC/pdfs/Stepping%20Stones%20to%20improved%20Relationships%20-%20web.pdf
I am using file::download. but the problem is its not downloading url with url encoded strings.
sharma
In the past I've done web application development using Visual Studio. Initially I'd use the design view, editing the page visually. But over time I learned more and more (X)HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I became familiar with the tags for ASP.NET server controls and their common attributes.
I got to the point where I'd do all the markup by hand (still in Visual Studio though) and then test the site in an actual browser. Of course I'd also still use Visual Studio for programming server side functionality in C#, but never the WYSIWYG page editor. I was able to get work done faster too, getting the site to look just the way I wanted, and the same across different browsers.
Now I'm going to be taking charge of a public facing website (entirely static content - no ASP.NET, PHP, or anything). The website was created and maintained using Dreamweaver, which I don't have and never used before.
I'll be working from home, so the organization is looking into getting me a copy of Dreamweaver. Even though it's not money out of my own pocket ...
Is it worth using Dreamweaver if I probably won't touch the visual editor?
Or should I tell them to save their money and I'll just use Notepad++.
Or am I crazy and should relearn to use a WYSIWYG editor?
I do 95% of my web dev stuff using Dreamweaver's code editor. But, for the other 5%, the WYSIWYG stuff really comes in handy.
Plus, it's not your money anyway. I'd say get it and if the WYSIWYG stuff is too much for you just keep it in source code mode and use it as an editor.
You may not know until you see the code. If they were using things like Dreamweaver templates, unless you are going to extricate them, you may end up needing Dreamweaver for sanity sake.
Dreamweaver is really useful if you maintain a site with templates. If the site is in PHP or ASP, then all you need to do is put the common parts (header, footer etc.) in a separate file and include them in the different pages. If the pages are static then the common parts can't be included. Which means that if you want to change the menu, you have to change it in all pages. With dreamweaver, you can save a page as a template and when you create a new page from a template, dreamweaver stores it in the comments. Next time you update the template, all the pages that use the template are updated. I found this to be the best use of dreamweaver.
I haven't used a WYSIWYG HTML editor in years, all the HTML I produce these days is hand-coded, and it's something I would recommend to anyone. WYSIWYG Editors simply make it far too easy to throw in tons of unnecessary markup, and then you end up with unwieldy pages that are tricky to work with and hard to fix browser compatibility problems in.
However. If you're taking over a large existing codebase that has been produced this way, I'd say you probably want to make sure you at least have access to Dreamweaver or a similar editor (if they were produced in Dreamweaver, that's probably the best choice). Simply because many pages designed in this way are rather verbose, and can be a nightmare to deal with in a text editor.
This depends - you mean old school Dreamweaver or CS4 Dreamweaver?
With all the new additions (code hinting with some of the newer javascript frameworks, a "preview" that is integrated with webkit so you can see your page in action, being able to test AJAX calls and do a "code freeze") I'm tempted to walk away from jedit and try it out.
I believe that DreamWeaver gives you intellisense in the code editor for HTML, so I would use it for that, if you're not paying for it. I wouldn't pay for that myself though :)
If the Visual Studio editor works fine for you, there is no point in switching.
And if you don't like WYSIWIG editing, then there's no point in learning it. I stopped using WYSIWIG years ago, and like you, I've found it to be much more flexible and reliable to edit HTML/CSS by hand.
If you like DreamWeaver more and the organisation is willing to pay for it, then go for it!
FWIW, I do a lot of HTML and javascript coding in dreamweaver's code view- the JSF extensions are nice as well. I got it as part of the CS3 bundle, since I needed to get my hands on photoshop and illustrator as well to carve up graphics. If possible, try to get your company to get the whole bundle, since graphics manipulation is always important when you're maintaining a site- and most designers will be giving you photoshop source files. I never ever go in wysiwyg mode, and it's still useful.
I use dreamweaver, but not for the same reasons as everyone here seem to. I like the syntax highlighting, and I absolutely LOVE the way Dreamweaver handles FTP in the window on the right. If I could find another editor that would offer these two things, I would, but none seem to be that great.
I code my pages by hand usually (I do a LOT of PHP, which dreamweaver 8 obviously can't preview) so I do a lot of things like (1) edit page (2) upload changes (3) preview live on testing server. However, I still use the WYSIWIG editor occasionally, especially if I need to throw something together using tables or form elements. I just find it to be a bit quicker that way than doing things by hand.
That said, I never use Dreamweaver (8, mind) for CSS, as the implementation is buggy at best. I much prefer to do CSS and more complex HTML by hand. I also do not use the standard method of templating, as I prefer to have one "index.php" that calls in the appropriate template and stuffs data into it that it generated before.
All that said though, Dreamweaver offers a nice enough set of tools that I don't really want to leave it, and it certainly won't hurt to learn it, especially if its free. I'd say at least try it out and see if its going to work before making a final decision. It comes down to what you personally prefer to use.
I hand-code but there are times Dreamweaver is incredibly useful:
Making visual-tweaks to someone else's complex HTML. It's much quicker to use the WYSIWYG if you're short on time and the code is a mess.
Dreamweaver has got an incredibly good search and replace. The tag-based searching is the best I've seen anywhere for you whilst the regex seach/replace allows back-references, named groups in the replace field etc.
The code Dreamweaver produces isn't too horrific and it's fairly good at not breaking your own nice code if you ever dip into the visual editor.
I use dreamweaver CS5 for code only on a daily basis, and it's a great tool. It is very effective, and its a great tool even for people who already know how to write code. Some of its' features that make it one of the best editors, in my opinion, are:
Code coloring
Customizable color-schemes
Error highlighting
in-app validation
Autocomplete & Codehinting (works great!)
in-app FTP
New document type dialog (great for quick start)
Search & replace
Code Snippets
There are many more features, like setting up a local server and binding it to a database so you can write queries more easily and use dreamweaver's "help" with server-side code, but I haven't really got into it.
Bottom line:
If you are considering getting Dreamweaver mostly for code editing, then I'd say it's definitely a great deal - even if you aren't going to use some of its' other features.
Dreamweaver's a tad bloated for something which you really can just do in Notepad (++ or otherwise). No WYSIWYG will give you code to the same quality as hand-crafted code. Especially since it's vanilla HTML, just use an everyday programmer's text editor. Having intellisense isn't that important: I mean, there's only about 10 tags you need to know.
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The people writing the user manual are not necessarily programmers, and they need a visual editor. A major issue is the internal format of the authoring tool; it should be readable text/html, so it's easy to compare versions of individual pages checked into version control.
DocBook
(source: docbook.org)
Microsoft HTML Help Workshop can be used to create good quality professional CHM help files. All you need is a bunch of HTML files. The tool "compiles" all these and bundles into a single Help file.
The HTML files can be generated using Microsoft Word/Frontpage or even Dreamweaver. You might want to consider source controlling these HTML files.
Latex. Lyx provides WYSIWYM for writing latex files.
At my old job they used a tool by madcap software called flare.
It seemed to work really well.
There are other professional products which allow help file writing and they have support of "context ID" which makes context sensitive help possible. Doc To Help and RoboHelp are these type of products.
A good combination to consider is Subversion, DocBook and Publican.
Version control = Subversion
Content Authoring = DocBook
Publishing = Publican
Optional WYSIWYG = Serna
At the moment, this is one of the toolchains in use by the world's largest provider of open source solutions, and the name behind much of the world's use of Linux-based operation systems in the enterprise market. Most (and close to all) of Red Hat's official documentation is created in such a manner. Same goes for Fedora.
The major "pro" here is that these are freely available tools, with a strong overlap in the market of technical writers. All of which will be able to (but might not want to) write in XML, and picking up DocBook is like picking up HTML in the 90's. Subversion is a very common version control tool, that like DocBook is relatively easy to implement and use. Publican is a great publishing tool that can take DocBook XML, and publish it to PDF, HTML, HTML-single, etc. Obviously your writers can use a WYSIWYG like Serna, but I use snippets in Geany (on Fedora) or TextMate (on OS X) personally.
The major "con" is the perception of technicality. Your writers might want WYSIWYG (and can have it), and depending on your documentation needs, this might be what you end up using. As you would know, there's a market out there for "Technical Writers" who specialize in fixing Microsoft Word styles (and markup), so the arguments for separating "authoring" from "publishing" are based on proven but distinct use cases for organizations that require documentation to be held up to the same standards of the engineering/programming/source production.
Some of the extreme advice you will get comes from people and companies that have been exposed to the value of XML documentation, and especially those in the realms of DITA, where certain multi-nationals have a reputation for acquisitions that are influenced by the format and availability of the product knowledge. there are also the arguments that locking your documentation into a "sticky" or closed format doesn't help the future maintenance requirements. This is where the open source options gain support on a corporate level. Plus, obviously, it's free.
You can use Subversion and MGTEK Help Producer. Help Producer makes help files from Word documents. TortoiseSVN comes with scripts to compare different revisions of Word documents, in Word itself (Word has a version compare tool).
Your users are going to want a visual diff tool that resembles the one they are editing in. If they are just slightly not-technical, DocBook or Latex aren't going to work (I've tried giving my users both, and I even tried Epic Editor as a DocBook editor which is very expensive but didn't work out very well after all). Sticking to something they know (Word) will prevent you many headaches.
I was very reluctant to go this route at first too, because I wanted a solution that was more 'technically perfect', but I realized over time that having happy and productive users was more important. Just saying that I know where you're coming from, but try the Word route - it works much better in practice than all the 'pure' text-based solutions that are out there. Regular users don't like markup based editing.
If you're using Visual Studio, take a look at SandCastle - http://www.codeplex.com/Sandcastle.
There's also a couple of tools that help you build sandcastle files, try searching "sandcastle" on codeplex. One of them is SandCastle Help File Builder (http://www.codeplex.com/SHFB), but I've never used it so I don't know if non-technical users will be happy with that.
Mapcap Flare is the best commercial tool around. Written by the ex-developers of Robodoc
I created a documentation system called Mandown (Markdown/Html/Javascript/file-based relatively linked documents for portability) which would easily go under version control. The visual editor part you would have to figure out separately - I sometimes use HTML-Kit which at least has a preview feature.
See What is the best way to store software documentation?
Here's another tool to check out: Xilize
We are using APT. It integrates well with the CI (standard build artifact) and is more alive than for instance word document. It is also possible to generate PDFs and other formats when needed.
Just wanted to get an idea for ways (web) developers get round the short fall of (most) WYSIWYG editors, whereby the users that are editing the text aren't always HTML literate enough to produce good/great results.
In the past we have resigned ourselves to either locking down the editor or simply not supplying one.
What are other peoples experiences?
If I understand your question correctly, my advice would be to allow basic text formatting in the editor (bold, italicize, underline, paragraph breaks, etc). Anything beyond that should be handled either by custom fields in your CMS system that talk to the corresponding template, or directly by your designers / front-end people. There really should be no designing going on in your text editor.
Also, using a templating language like Markdown might help editors feel more comfortable formatting their pages.
If you have the resources (as the question implies you do) you get the users to supply copy and designs in what they do know (Powerpoint, Word, Fireworks, etc) and get the people who can do a correct implementation (but who might not be able to write decent prose, etc) to put it into the HTML/CMS/magicthing.
Sometimes it is possible to use something like WYMeditor - it isn't that simple but produces clean semantic code. The other way is using some wiki-like code - Markdown for example. And you can ease editor's life by using some helpers like MarkItUp editor (it also supports original Wiki and Textile).