"Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> writes:

quoted text
> With AsciiDoc we've managed to avoid the arcane format, but we are
> still laden with a horrid toolchain.

Let's put this somewhat into perspective: the toolchain is horrid with
regard to the complexity and documentation (well, AsciiDoc
documentation itself is quite thorough and reasonably organized, but
it does not buy you much without learning Docbook, and learning
Docbook is such a chore that people would rather use AsciiDoc in order
to avoid it), not horrid regarding the usability or flexibility of the
results.

If we had a few people specializing in Docbook/AsciiDoc/XSLT available
constantly on the team, we could probably get along fine.

quoted text
> In that light, I actually like what Johannes is doing, even though
> it's a timesink.

The problem is not just that it is a timesink now, but that it will
remain a timesink.  There is a reason that we don't have so many
formats around with multiple high-quality backends.

quoted text
> Do the other text based alternatives these days have a workable high
> quality PDF/latex output format without pulling in brittle
> dependencies like XSLT?

Texinfo produces good info and plain text, tolerable PDF and HTML and
not-quite-usable Docbook.  The output for HTML from the current git
documentation toolchain certainly looks better.  I don't see how to
generate PDF right now, but there must be a way (xmlto complains about
not seeing passivetex though I have it installed in TeXlive).

The source is uglier than AsciiDoc, but then there is no cleverly
disguised information in it: every formatting detail is quite out in
the open.  The same is true for Docbook, but Docbook really eats the
cake, platter and all concerning unreadability of the input.  On the
other hand, there are more special-purpose editors that know how to
deal with Docbook/XML than there are for Texinfo.

Texinfo gives a reasonable subset of Linus-thinkalikes the cooties,
and that pretty much rules it out: we need a format that people are
willing to write in.

There are not really many options for versatile formats, I am afraid.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
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