Tuesday, January 11 2005 @ 06:42 PM EST Contributed by: glosser
The NewsForge brings us a tutorial on how to publish and maintain documents online with OpenOffice Writer.
OpenOffice.org Writer offers a wide range of sophisticated tools for creating complex documents such as manuals and technical documentation. However, when it comes to publishing the finished results online, your options are rather limited. You can, of course, use OOo Web to convert existing files into HTML, but you might want a more powerful and flexible tool to maintain the published documents online -- a wiki, for example, and specifically DokuWiki, which is designed for documentation.
A wiki, in its simplest form, is software that allows anyone to edit any Web page published on a given site. You can log in (if the wiki supports user authorisation), add new pages, and edit existing ones. Since most wikis include version control tools, they are particularly suitable for collaborative editing. Using a wiki, you can keep track of all changes in a Web page and compare different versions of a page side-by-side.
DokuWiki is a wiki designed especially for managing documentation. Apart from the nice lightweight user interface, DokuWiki's includes useful features such as newsfeeds, support for multiple languages, and section editing. More importantly, since DokuWiki keeps all the data in text files, it doesn't rely on MySQL, which greatly simplifies the installation procedure and maintenance.
