buying or selling?

[cellio]

I just received (at work) a phone call from a consulting firm. It was pretty obvious that he was calling to either (try to) recruit me or sell services to me, depending on how the first 30 seconds of the conversation went. It was pretty amusing. He apparently doesn't get a lot of "actually, I'm very satisfied with my current position and company" these days. :-) But they might actually have some relevant services, so it wasn't a waste of my 15 minutes either.

(Specifically, if someone could come in and affordably wave the DocBook [1] magic wand for us, with fairly painless migration and all the flexibility we currently have, I'd lobby for that expenditure. There are important things that my current tools can't do and that, apparently, DocBook can. But I don't have the cycles to climb the steep curve right now.)

[1] Or maybe we should be looking at a different tool instead. That evaluation would be part of the job.

Comments

[sethg]

Here are some comments by Norman Walsh, one of the DocBook demigods, that seem apropos to your situation....

[cellio]

Thanks for the pointer!

We're already using XML, with a home-grown tool. I'm one of those structured-authoring geeks he refers to, so I'm perfectly fine with this. I never liked the mishmash of semantic and formatting tags in HTML, for example. (And don't get me started on Word... :-) ) My learning curve is going to be about the tool itself, and customizing a DTD, and stuff like that. (I'm an XML user right now; I've never written a DTD, though I've edited them at times.)

I'm going to see what other interesting articles Norman has tucked away on that site. I'll bet the subject is covered. :-)