Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

60%
+1 −0
Q&A Tools for multiple creators/writers documentation without clouds

I have used source control in documentation for several reasons besides multiple writers working on the same file. Some other uses are: Tracking and communicating changes Deploying documentation ...

posted 9y ago by Joe Malin‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T03:47:22Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/13019
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Joe Malin‭ · 2019-12-08T03:47:22Z (over 4 years ago)
I have used source control in documentation for several reasons besides multiple writers working on the same file. Some other uses are:

- Tracking and communicating changes
- Deploying documentation to a web site
- Integrating documentation with software builds. For example, I worked in a doc/software system that facilitated linking javadoc to other documentation.
- Documentation review. Depending on the format of your documentation, you can use the same review tools that software engineers use for reviewing their code. For example, HTML documentation is relatively easy to review this way.

I also think that you should strive to divide up documentation tasks so that writers work on their own set of files whenever possible. I can think of a huge number of reasons that this approach is preferable.

Having said all this, here are my specific answers to the OP's question:

You can generate PDF from HTML or XML, given the right tools. PDF is so popular that many tools support it out of the box. Because PDF is Adobe, the best PDF generation support is from FrameMaker, alas.

If you want source control without a cloud server, you should look at Git, which is an open-source distributed system. Technically speaking, Git doesn't have a "central" repository. Instead, everybody that's interested in a set of software , documentation, and so forth gets their own copy, which is called a repository. All repositories are created equal, and each one can be branched and merged at will. Most of Git's software handles merging and conflict resolution.

I can't answer for the overhead of the tools for generating PDF, but the overhead for Git depends on the number of files and the type of each file in each repository. Internally, Git tracks changes to text files rather than the entire file itself, but Git can't do this for binary files (such as .fm or .doc).

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2014-10-02T19:06:35Z (over 9 years ago)
Original score: 0