Rails - Jul 2006 - Document Management Suggestions

I am looking to create an intranet document management solution that would
take advantage of Ruby/Rails/Subversion etc.

I want to get away from document management using MS Word, Excel etc.

Can anyone recommend a direction I should investigate?

I am currently gathering information on Docbook, Latex, ODF,ODT,ODG,ODP,
TinyMCE and others as I find them.

Ideally I would like to convert manuals that are several hundred pages long
in MS Word format into a format that lends itself to be managed under
Subversion. I would like to be able to compare revisions side by side and
see exactly who made what changes. I would also like to be able to derive
different end user formatted documents from one source document i.e. Docbook
--> pdf or html or wml etc...

Is anyone doing this currently and can you point me to some reading material
for accomplishing this under RoR. I do not mind doing the work as Rails has
been a joy to use so far in my limited experiences as a ROR newbie!

Thanks!

M.W.
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I would highly recommend Textile (redcloth) [1] or Markdown  
(bluecloth) [2].  It should be quite reasonable to programmatically  
convert from Word to (export-style) HTML and then to either format.   
Things like complex tables that can''t be rendered in mark* can remain  
as HTML.  These formats do a particularly good job with diffs (as  
viewed from version control), since the plain text formats are so  
readable.  They then render into attractive XHTML or PDF..  I would  
recommend markdown because I find it''s plaintext more readable and  
editable [3][4].  Note that the One Encyclopedia Per Child (part of  
the One Laptop Per Child) project is going with markdown.  Here are  
other options [5].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_%28markup_language%29
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown
[3]: http://textism.com/tools/textile/index.php?sample=2
[4]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics.text
[5[: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
Comparison_of_document_markup_languages


            - dan
-- 
Dan Kohn <mailto:dan@dankohn.com>
<http://www.dankohn.com/>  <tel:+1-415-233-1000>



On Jul 18, 2006, at 9:13 AM, M.W. Rails wrote:
> I am looking to create an intranet document management solution  
> that would take advantage of Ruby/Rails/Subversion etc.
>
> I want to get away from document management using MS Word, Excel etc.
>
> Can anyone recommend a direction I should investigate?
>
> I am currently gathering information on Docbook, Latex,  
> ODF,ODT,ODG,ODP, TinyMCE and others as I find them.
>
> Ideally I would like to convert manuals that are several hundred  
> pages long in MS Word format into a format that lends itself to be  
> managed under Subversion. I would like to be able to compare  
> revisions side by side and see exactly who made what changes. I  
> would also like to be able to derive different end user formatted  
> documents from one source document i.e. Docbook --> pdf or html or  
> wml etc...
>
> Is anyone doing this currently and can you point me to some reading  
> material for accomplishing this under RoR. I do not mind doing the  
> work as Rails has been a joy to use so far in my limited  
> experiences as a ROR newbie!
>
> Thanks!
>
> M.W.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails@lists.rubyonrails.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
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