Little survey about software manuals

[lorcan]

..I remember the last time I tried to install Ruby on my main Windows 8.1 computer

https://rubyinstaller.org/downloads/

2.3.3 works fine here on a Windows 10 box.
Or you could use WSL if you switch to W10 https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/comman ... tall_guide

[FabienTDR]

Lol, feeling a bit prehistoric when reading all this.

I'm totally fine with MS word + fireworks/photoshop when needed, or a few other third parties for graphs and special illustrations.

Most time goes into content anyway, "deployment" considerations are overkill in this market imho. English only is fine for most pro markets. Many manuals, if they even exist, typically lack content and information. I've seen questionable documentation trends in several companies over the last years, attempting to enforce a "Doxygenization" of good old authorship and redaction work. This doesn't work well, most humans are unlikely to enjoy the results, most time and effort being wasted. "No spectators here anyway".

IMHO the most important aspect with manuals, beside traditional structure/readability standards, is to entertain, surprise and reward. "Doxygenized" documentation workflows are straight incapable to cover these 3 aspects. For me, a good manual reads like a good book.

[Miles1981]

Seems like the official implementation doesn't have a pdf backend anymore?

Sure it does !
https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf
http://asciidoctor.org/docs/render-docu ... put-format

On thing I like about it is that you can also output clean html/css and make your docs available online, such as https://www.lmdsp.com/products/superchord/manual/

Ouah... Really difficult to find it. I spend some time trying to find the list of backends, went through the man page, no mention of the pdf output.
Thanks though.

[Guillaume Piolat]

So Asciidoctor looks most promising, wondering how it deals with multi-lingual.

[Christian Schüler]

LATeX and LyX
http://www.lyx.org