[MPlayer-dev-eng] A Modest LyX/HTML Example

[Daniel A. Nagy]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 01:12:37PM +0100, Daniel Egger wrote:
> > Why not work in just clear LaTeX or texinfo instead? Requiring LyX
> > seems to be an unnecessary pain if other people are going to be
> > working on the docs too. Last I checked, normal LyX (as opposed to the
> > KDE port KLyX) also required XForms which is non-free...
>
> It's included in Debian and thus it's free enough. That alone wouldn't
> matter but LyX is not really the right product to do documentation in.

Unfortunately, that's not true. LyX itself is in the contrib section,
meaning that it does depend on non-free stuff, while XForms are in the
non-free section, meaning that there are some licensing issues that do not
grant the four essential freedoms:

0. to use for whatever purpose you want to
1. to study and modify the code for your needs
2. to copy and redistribute without restrictions
3. to publish your improvements to benefit the community

Actually, XForms are "free" only for non-commercial purposes, and do not
come with the sourcecode. Thus, unfortunately they ARE non-free.

> I would recommend using DocBook/SGML or DocBook/XML which can be
> transformed into literally any other format on earth and has the
> nice attribute of being able to keep away the style from the text.

LyX is the most convenient editor out there from DocBook/SGML. It can both
import and export in that format. If you read the HOWTO-HOWTO, it's the
recommended tool for the LinuxDoc Project.

I'd recommend to keep the authoritative version in SGML (or XML), but
encourage the use of lyx for editing it.

> I'd even volunteer to setup the whole system and do the conversion of
> the HTML docs into DocBook for a start.

That'd help a lot, even if you refuse to use LyX.

-- 
Daniel