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pdg137
Asked: 2012-01-07 11:45:36 +0800 CST

Text-file based document preparation system

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I am looking for a system to prepare internal technical documents that has the following basic features:

  1. source files should be human-readable text files, so they play well with revision control
  2. supports basic formatting (e.g. images, tables, boldface, etc.)
  3. works with both English and Chinese characters
  4. outputs to PDF

I could, for example, users to write HTML pages and print the pages to PDF, but this seems complicated and error-prone, and HTML is only barely "human-readable". LaTeX is also very complicated, and it has a lot of dependencies that might make it hard to process documents that are several years old.

Does anyone have any better suggestions?

version-control pdf document-management

7 Answers

  1. Sphinx might do the trick. http://sphinx.pocoo.org/

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  2. Are you using some kind of server-side language such as PHP?

    if yes you could use the FPDF Library... (http://html2fpdf.sourceforge.net/)

    You basically feed it BASIC html and it will output a PDF....

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  3. Haven't used this personally but have heard good reports from others. Quick search indicates that it supports Chinese and PDF. Very basic markup and easy to learn obviously.

    http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ You've obviously investigated Latex/Tex. Have you thought about using a WYSIWYG editor such as Lyx? http://www.lyx.org/ Judging by the fact that there are also Chinese LDP translation projects, LinuxDoc and Docbook support for Chinese is also likely to be good. Toolchain for document conversion is also likely to be more mature/bug free as well.

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  4. How about this extension to markdown (until markdown adds support for tables, etc.)

    http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/features/

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  5. I think the best answer here is DocBook.
    It's XML based, so the source is

    a) non-binary,

    b) human-readable, and

    c) source control / diff-friendly.

    You can use any UTF-8 characters you like, as long as you're compiling to PDF with a font that supports them (if you choose to embed an openfont).

    DocBook can be "compiled" into a number of formats, including HTML, PDF, and some others too.

    DocBook to PDF

    DocBook Tutorial

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  6. Here is something I found while searching for markdown: Pandoc. It can convert a number of formats including Markdown and Textile into PDF. One thing that seems lacking is control over the version of the markup and formatting engines used in preparing documents. This makes it likely that source files will need to be constantly updated to keep up with the latest version of Pandoc, which could be a major problem in the long term.

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  7. Best Answer

    One possible solution is Docutils. Its "restructuredtext" format is more readable than other options, and it has built-in support for tables. The maintainers seems to be doing a good job documenting and maintaining the package, which should keep it relatively stable.

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