wiki/docbook/latex documentation template system

Question

Hi. I'm searching for a documentation template system or rather will be creating one. It should support the following features:

• Create output in PDF and HTML
• Support for large & complicated (LaTeX) formulas
• References between documents
• Bibliographies
• Templates will be filled by a Python script

I've tried LaTeX with various TeX-to-HTML converters but I'm not satisfied with the results. I've been using DocBook for a while, but I think that editing DocBook is not easy to write and the support for formulas is not yet sufficient.

The main problem is, that there will be users of this system that do not know LaTeX syntax or DocBook. I've thought about an alternative for these users providing an editing possibility with Wiki syntax (converted by Python to LaTeX).

Let's sum up: I want HTML and PDF output from at least LaTeX and Wiki input. DocBook could be used as intermediate format.

Has anybody had a similar problem or can give me an advice on which tools and which file formats I should use ?

Answer 1

We use sphinx: http://sphinx.pocoo.org

It does almost all of that.

Your python script or your users or whomever (I can't follow the question) can create content using RST markup (which is perhaps the easiest of markup languages). You run it through Sphinx and you get HTML and Latex.

Answer 2

I created a LaTeX pre-processor and python module that allows you to embed python or SQL inside a LaTeX file. The python and/or SQL is executed and the output is folded in.

With latex2html or latex2rtf you can then use the LaTeX code to produce HTM and RTF.

I've posted it for you at http://simson.net/pylatex/

Answer 3

Arbortext supports LaTeX natively. You can send the publishing engine or print composer LaTeX and it'll pass it through directly.

It also supports a lot of other composition languages as well and even gives the opportunity to do page-layout manipulation like you'd see in InDesign (without the headache and overhead of ID).