Using TortiseSVN to put it into the windows desktop shell, it's nearly transparent, and it allows atomic commits to work intelligently, making the engineers who work with programs that have multiple files (hardware in myb case, a half dozen files for each PCB design, it works even better for revision control for the software guys), which has allowed us to recover a really insane amount of time we'd been handing over to M$SS for maintainance and babysitting. All employees use it for everything, from notes on ideas in Notepad or BBEdit or pico, to massive software projects with hundreds of files and over a million lines of code. (This is, of course, usually a terrible idea, resulting in official RIF memos from HR written in Comic Sans I think there's a happy medium somewhere in between.)Īfter several years of working with SourceSafe and it's truly braindead way of dealing with atomic commits and binary files (not to mention the massive data loss problems we had with it) my office switched to SVN for EVRYTHING. This is fine if what you're writing are academic research papers, but for most corporate communication people are accustomed to more effortless (read: WYSIWYG) control over the output. Compare Word's graphical table builder and tab ruler, the result of about 20 years of noodling around with the best user experience for creating such things, with OW MY WORD PROCESSOR.Įven if you give everyone a pocket syntax reference, unless you have a TeX ninja working overtime on your templates, you'll still end up with a lot of documents that look like academic research papers. I love LaTeX (I have TeXShop open in the background right now!), but I have to argue with the assertion that the uninitiated "man on the street" can be just as productive as s/he was in Word.
LaTeX's markup makes so much sense that a WYSIWYG tool isn't necessary, for even the man on the street can be just a productive with doing it up in a text editor. If you are working hands-on with large amounts of XML in a production setting, I strongly recommend that you check it out. It's neither libre nor gratis, but it's well worth the money, and much cheaper than the (other) commercial alternatives.
(It also provides for editing and debugging XSLT stylesheets, although I don't personally use it for that at present.) It's available on *nix, Windows, and Mac (yes, it's a Java GUI app, but it's remarkably fast and stable one). It also validates, pretty-prints, and does a good job performing diffs and merges between different versions of large (100+ K) documents. It's thoroughly DocBook-aware and does nice transformations of shorter DocBook documents into HTML and PDF. I use oXygenXML as my principal XML editor. It's also relatively easy for us to produce documentation that's either standalone or integrated with larger documents, such as the Connectors manuals.
We also maintain the Internals Manual using this system.
These include the online manuals at which get updated 4 times a day from our SVN repositories. We produce end-user docs in HTML, PDF, TexInfo, plaintext, CHM, and a couple of other formats. We maintain 3 distinct versions of a >1600-page software manual this way, in numerous translations. We use DocBook XML for the source format of the MySQL Manuals, and SVN for version control.