Open Source Tools For Documentation Creation?

chuqui asks: "I'm looking for some help from the /. group mind. I have a consulting opportunity that involves a large, complex system. Designing and building this beast is going to require a wad O'documentation, and I'm looking for ideas and tools to help deal with this, especially with flow diagrams and flow charts (I could adapt a traditional flowcharting tool, but these are more process diagrams than code flowcharts), and some way of documenting a good sized SQL system, with the schema, the tables and the connections..." If there is a single tool that can do all this, I would be pleasantly surprised, but I'm sure that there is a decent suite of tools that can be collected from the Open Source Software Catalog that would be perfect for this type of work. Right?

"I've found some tools I could use, but they all live on That Other System. The place I'm doing this for is open to considering Open Source tools for the project, so I have a chance to throw a couple of more chinks into the IS ivory tower armor if I can find find the right tools.

So I'd love some feedback from the group mind: what tools do you use to help keep a handle on large project designs, especially those involving database systems. I need process flow documentation and a way to manage the database definitions, but I'd love to hear about all of your favorite tools. I'd love to be able to bring forward a complete project management solution that's open source, just to prove it can be done to the people who believe life begins and ends with three letters and white coats...."

Comments

Toolkit for Conceptual Modeling

[cafebabe]

Look at the Toolkit for Conceptual Modeling It runs under Linux and Solaris and is distributed under the GPL. It can be used to design tables, trees, ER diagrams, UML(use cases, collaboration diagrams, etc.), data and event flow diagrams, state transition diagrams, and many other types of documents. It can output data in PostScript, encapsulated PostScript, or FIG. I've used it for projects before and it offers pretty much all of the functionality you would get from a program like Visio. (And if you drop the TCM diagrams into LaTeX, you'll get something that looks better than anything you could hope to produce on "that other platform".)

Good luck!