On 8/14/2017 10:37 AM, Robert Ramey via Boost wrote:
On 8/14/17 12:40 AM, Andrzej Krzemienski via Boost wrote:
I do not know anything about the project, so I am not really addressing your question,but I wonder how it is possible to get a unified look and feel across all the libraries when library authors are given freedom to use whatever format for their documentation, whatever tool, and whatever approach to documentation.
I don't think it is possible.
This leaves us with a couple of options:
a) Enforce the usage of boost book for documentation as condition of acceptance and inclusion of a library in boost. This would guarantee consistent look and feel across libraries.
b) Encourage everyone to "do their own thing". Which would almost certainly result in a wide variation of look and field.
c) Improve the boostbook documentation and related tooling to make it so compelling that only an idiot or egomaniac would decide not to use it. This would be the best of course. But it's a lot of work and we're not there yet. And of course in any large organization, there's always a couple of idiots/ecomaniacs or people who act that way on an occasional basis.
Actually, this was the motivation for my post. I think when this initiative was announced we were on the right track. But I think we lost our way on this one. I don't know if it's possible to all get back on the same page, but it would be a good thing if we could.
The main objection to the quickbook - boostbook - doxygen way of generating documentation, as I understand it, is that it is very hard to generate a different look-and-feel to the documentation from the standard one created by the stylesheets. OTOH others think having the same look-and-feel of all Boost docs is an advantage. So I do not think there is any way around this basic disagreement. I do understand that other issues have been mentioned, such as lack of support for diagrams ( graphviz ? ) or formulas ( MathML ? ) directly in quickbook. But we have the source for quickbook and can modify it accordingly, so I do not think that quickbook is itself the problem. I do agree that writing directly in boostbook ( or docbook ) is a real pain, which I have always found I could forgo, but quickbook has always been supremely easy to use for me.
Robert Ramey