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| # | Title | User Story | Importance | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Authoring | ||||
| A1 | open standard format | enables multiple tools to edit | Required | |
| A2 | text source format | amenable to versioning tools | Required | |
| A3 | UML-tool based | |||
| A4 | Source content directly human readable | editable with generic text editors | Useful | |
| Publishing | ||||
| P1 | Single source publishing | one set of source artefacts to generate all outputs | Required | |
| P2 | Can generate HTML website | Useful |
Alternatives
| Tools | Source formats | Ouput formats | Table | Figure | Source code readability | Pros | Cons | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Continue with FrameMaker | Frame, MagicDraw | move to DITA, XMI | PDF, HTML | GUI | GUI | low (XML) | Easy to edit static content & figures. High quality PDF output. DITA standard content. | Expensive tooling, Adobe support poor. No specific integration with UML tool generated content. | |
Move to Madcap Flare | Madcap Flare, MagicDraw | DITA, XMI | PDF, HTML, other | GUI | GUI | low (XML) | Easy to edit static content & figures. High quality PDFs and other downstream formats. DITA standard content. | No specific integration with UML tool generated content. | |
| HTML authoring + MagicDraw | MagicDraw, HTML tools | XMI, HTML | HTML | HTML source | medium (HTML) | ||||
| ODF-based solution (MagicDraw) | MagicDraw, Word | Apache OpenOffice | ODF tools Achieved using MagicDraw's embedded Velocity statement approach | ODF, XMI | PDF, HTML | GUI | GUI | low (XML) | Easy to edit static content & figures. | ||
| ODF-based solution (manual) | MagicDraw, Word | Apache OpenOffice | ODF tools | ODF, XMI | GUI | GUI | low (XML) | ||||
| Asciidoc-based solution | MagicDraw, AsciiDoctor | XMI, AsciiDoc | HTML, PDF, man, EPUB | Character base | Need other tools to make figure. Size can be attributed. | good (text) | well designed for publishing. | requires users' technical skills. huge documents for specifications. | |
| Markdown-based solution | MagicDraw, text editor | markdown text, XMI | HTML, PDF | Character base (need extension) | Need other tools to make figure. cannot resize original figure. | good (text) | Easy syntax. Widely adopted to many web applications. | requires users' technical skills. Not well standardised yet. poorly support for publishing | need to specify implementation platform, because there are many dialects on syntax. |
| EPUB based solution | brackets | HTML, CSS | EPUB(Zipped HTML) | e-publishing standard | few editor to support ePub3 |
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