Posted by wolandscat on
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Gem-paths-craziness-on-cygwin-tp3425p3438.html

Re: rvm - done, see this issue.

Babun looks interesting - I've always been a unix guy (used to work on Solaris and SunOS workstations and I manage a few servers in the background), so I've put cygwin on every Windows PC I've had for the last 15+ years. Old habits like that make one somewhat oblivious to nice new things like this.

Re: which tools: I'm perfectly fine with the ruby/gem based tools, but I would just say that a big 'getting started safely' page is needed for devs and others (I'm no longer really a dev, apart from some compiler building in Eiffel language ;-) who are not ruby-ites.

I'd personally rather see one set of tools, bullet-proof installation info, and more functionality rather than replication. There's no one perfect language any more, and Java has its own problems - use Eclipse? (free but like bringing an aircraft carrier to a fishing trip) Use IntelliJ? (Ok if you're already a java dev). And so on. The main challenge in any language technology isn't the language, it's learning the libraries and frameworks.

Our goal in this is to replace the publishing setup we had with FrameMaker, and have a single source tool chain generating HTML (maybe more than one kind) and PDF, based on documentation fragments and images extracted from UML tools - instlalled in a continuous build environment with push events coming from the Github source repos.

So far (once we got past the gem gremlins) it's looking very possible - assuming we can tame the PDF side. There's a fair way to go to replicate Frame's output quality (especially with ePub back-end for HTML), but the Asciidoctor toolchain looks like it will go close, and the HTML output stage coupled with the stylesheet-factory (even I managed to create a decent custom stylesheet) is very good indeed (last thing to get right there is more powerful internal Xrefs).

I think it's crucial to retain as separate the various levels of formatting directives, so that a core 'master.adoc' really can be published nicely in HTML, PDF, DocBook etc, and I see that that is indeed the mentality of the development approach, so that's good to see.

BTW, you are welcome to use our asciidoc development repo as a reference test location for long technical documents with HTML and PDF output, and a lot of file including, plus custom stylesheets. Still fairly rough, but it could be useful for testing.