-----Original Message----- From: Boost [mailto:boost-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of Vladimir Prus Sent: 06 December 2014 06:54 To: boost@lists.boost.org Subject: Re: [boost] Do we need BoostBook?
On 12/06/2014 02:41 AM, Robert Ramey wrote:
Vladimir Prus-3 wrote
As heretic as it sounds, do we get any benefits from BoostBook? It's a complex vocabulary, with complex toolchain, and while PDF generation sounded nice 10 years ago, printing HTML into PDF is a viable option these days - and nobody would want to print entire Boost documentation anyway?
Thoughts?
The current toolchain from Quickbook via Boostbook and Doxygen may not be ideal (it's certainly tediously slow for large libraries like Boost.Math) but it's the best we have unless someone is going to start from scratch and make something *much* better. Although not universally like, I believe the results can be better than other docs build systems. Many of those critical of the results (and tedium), are dealing with small libraries whose documentation is almost trivial in comparison with the bigger libraries. And the prospect of converting existing documentation to any new/other system isn't appealing :-( Indexes and googling often finds what you want to know, but when it fails, I find the PDF format *is* very useful - mainly because one can search the *whole* documentation. You can even read it in airline mode on your portable computing device ;-) So it's the devil we know and he's always better... Paul --- Paul A. Bristow Prizet Farmhouse Kendal UK LA8 8AB +44 (0) 1539 561830