Slashdot Mirror

Ragetech asks: "I've been given the seemingly impossible task of finding a way to do automated publishing to the Web for primarily technical documentation. The task doesn't sound so bad, until you start looking the constraints and emphasize the need for a _inexpensive_ solution. I've looked at many different vendors but all of the ideal solutions seem to have price tags around $100k and above. They don't seem to be targeting small- or medium-sized businesses at all, and $100k is way outside my price range. So what are people using out there to do this type of thing? I want to enable our users to publish technical documents/manuals to the Web, preferably with some sort of structure (like, say, the DocBook DTD) so they can concentrate on creating/updating/keeping alive content. What do people use?"

"Here's the gist of what I'm looking for:

1. Complete solution, including a user-friendly, cross-platform editor, to some sort of content management, to automated publishing to the Web, and perhaps other formats such as PDF, RTF, etc.
2. If a mark-up technology, such as SGML/XML (which I would prefer) the way authors deal with content they cannot be burdened with learning a ton of markup. Ideally, they shouldn't have to learn much of anything... it should be a semi-WYSIWYG type editor such that the markup can be hidden from view and they can concentrate strictly on content and structure.
3. The authorship tool(s)/editor must be cross-platform, but the publishing engine and Web server could run on anything.
4. It shouldn't require a great deal of styling to get it to the Web. If I have to create a different style sheet for every darn document it isn't a good solution. It's technical documentation so it doesn't have to look too pretty, it just has to be structured sanely.
5. Preferably, it should be searchable on the Web.

I've looked at Arbortext, which has probably the best XML/SGML editor I've ever seen but they don't really have an integrated CMS/DMS (content management/documentation management system) and their web publisher is mucho bucks. I've looked at Crystal Software, Broadvision, etc. Everything comes in too high. My starting place was www.xmlsoftware.com but I can't find a whole, solid solution. For example, I setup Cocoon, a Java-based xml Web publishing engine from XML Apache.org but that still leaves me short an editor solution.

So here's the gist of my question: on one end of the scale, I could have users put technical documentation using Word. On the other end of the scale I could buy an integrated XML-based Web portal solution such as Data Channel. I need something in-between the lame and the awesome (but out of my price range). Any suggestions?? There have to be solutions out there, otherwise there's a whole untapped market I think."