Technical Writing Using OpenOffice.org Writer (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Aug 26, 2004 16:49 UTC (Thu) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]

Let's not pick favorites, but Knuth uses neither FrameMaker nor OpenOffice.

Posted Aug 26, 2004 17:23 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (subscriber, #15888) [Link]

Way back when (20+ years ago) I was doing a fair bit of technical writing. On a rather lame computer for the task (a CDC Cyber, with (then) it's strange 6/12-bit character set. I ended up writing a [gtn]roff-like processor, actually modelled more on {IBM, Waterloo} Script. Portable, written in Pascal (internally it used a defined character type essentially ASCII, translated on input and output). It was used by a few other Cyber sites, and for years I used it on DOS (compiled with TurboPascal) and Unix for my own writing. Called it "formal".

I was certainly inspired by the roff series (including DEC's old runoff), but liked the more regular command set of Script. (If anyone cares, the source can be had from http://www.ajwm.net/amayer/software/readme-fml.html) It was used to produce quite a few manuals, papers and other documents at Concordia Uni. and other places back in the day.