Re: How do you convert documentation between formats such as XML, PDF and CHM

["Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 10:12 AM, Tim Mantyla <tim -dot- mantyla -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> Does anyone know what's involved in converting documentation between
> different documentation formats such as XML, PDF and CHM formats
> (programmatically or otherwise)? Software? Knowlege?

PDF and CHM are output formats; your source would most probably be in XML.
There are various dialects of XML for single-sourcing purposes;
DocBook has been around for quite some time, and so has DITA, which is
now gaining popularity pretty fast, apparently. If the job you are
looking at is in the IBM sphere, it's likely that the XML in question
is DITA - but you should ask.

http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookPublishingTools describes DocBook
XML publishing tools;
http://dita.xml.org/book/getting-started covers first steps with DITA;
publishing info is at
http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/doc/ot-userguide/xhtml/key_concepts/processing_publishing.html
XSLT and XSL-FO play the main roles in publishing from XML to output formats.
It is possible to, if you have Microsoft's HTML Help Workshop
installed, publish to CHM from the DITA Open Toolkit, using XHTML as
your primary output. See
http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/doc/ot-userguide/xhtml/installing/installing_optional_tools.html
Several commercial tools are available that do the transformation from
XML to PDF and other formats; a quick Google search would yield lots
of those.

Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML#Processing_XML_files (which
you may have read already).

> The job requires "converting IBM WebSphere Application Server, in WebLogic
> or Tomcat."

Doesn't make sense. All three are software platforms/stacks, from
different organizations. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSphere_Application_Server
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebLogic and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Tomcat
"Converting the applications into/using other applications" doesn't
make sense...  nor does converting their (different) documentation. I
recommend you get this clause of the job description
clarified/rephrased by the recruiter.

HTH
Ed.
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