[daisy] Daisy Summary/Overview/Why-You-Want-It Information

[Michael Stivers]

Regarding PDFs and Daisy:

I would suggest that it would be worth investigating use of a PDF 
rendering engine such as  RenderX or Antenna House rather than what comes 
with Daisy out-of-the-box (Ibex, or now Apache FOP). It can be frustrating 
to try to generate professional quality PDFs with the tools that come with 
Daisy by default. In any case, I expect you'd need some XSL-FO expertise. 
(I've been working with Daisy for several months now in the context of 
developing technical publcations at software company.)

Additionally, as a suggestion -- we have found that having a separate 
content navigation document that is then imported into both the site 
navigation and book definition documents is useful because it allows you 
to maintain both at the same time.  You can then create multiple content 
navigation documents if you wish, set up other book defintions, and so on, 
for greater output flexibility (and more potential confusion, too!) 
Although this approach is logical and somewhat elegant (to my way of 
thinking), it can be confusing to new users.

I was at the CMS/DITA 2008 conference and found the discussion around the 
Daisy CMS to be quite interesting thanks to the presentation by Peter 
Dykstra. I would emphasize, though, that open source does not mean free, 
especially if you are intending to use Daisy in a professional technical 
publications / training environment. The are costs involved in 
implementing it, customizing it, getting your content into it, 
administering it, and so on. I would also argue that aspects of Daisy's 
authoring interface needs improvement.

All that being said, Daisy offers an appealing semi-structured solution. 
You can establish some structure with the use of metadata fields and 
document types while at the same time not requiring authors to be experts 
about a complex schema / DTD.  This opens things up to a wider community 
of authors, making a more collaborative environment possible.


---------
Michael Stivers
QAD, Inc.





Steven Noels <stevenn at outerthought.org> 
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04/15/2008 05:25 AM
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Re: [daisy] Daisy Summary/Overview/Why-You-Want-It Information






On 13 Apr 2008, at 23:59, Eric Armstrong wrote:

> I just posted the following entry at my blog. I think the
> information needs to migrate to the website, somewhere.
> After visiting the site twice, I had no idea of what it
> was truly capable of. It's a story that deserves wider
> circulation...
>
> Daisy: WYSIWYG Wiki for PDF Books
> http://blogs.sun.com/coolstuff/entry/daisy_wysiwyg_wiki_for_pdf
> If you need the collaborative aspects of a Wiki combined with 
> DITA's modular topics and publishing capabilities, then DAISY might 
> just be the system you need--and it's free. DAISY provides WYSIWYG 
> editing for Wiki pages that can be combined to publish books, 
> either in a PDF or as a single HTML page.


Eric,

cool post, thanks. And yes, you're right. We really need to spice up 
the Daisy landing page as people obviously don't get what it's about. 
OTOH, your perception might still be too limiting for others - in the 
sense that we're falling prey to the Flexibility Syndrome: there's 
simply too many scenarios we could address with Daisy, thus we fall 
back to a safe "reference" list of technical features rather than 
showing how Daisy can solve problems instead.

I think anyone would love to hear more about your perception of 
Daisy, especially should you start using it in earnest.

Indeed, I definitely sense a path of specialisation towards "DITA"- 
like contexts, while at the same time we have been building quite 
some nice website applications with Daisy, without ever feeling we 
were abusing the concepts of the system.

Equally important might be providing a number of Daisy appliances: 
one for knowledge management, one for manual production, etc etc. I 
figure it's pretty much a chicken and egg problem for us: if we build 
these things, maybe people will come and generate revenue one way or 
another. However, it's non-trivial to postpone cash-generating 
activities in favor of this more "marketing"-oriented work.

Contrastingly, I know that quite a few companies are using Daisy 
however don't share the burden of getting the word around (let alone 
share insights with this community). In an ideal world, people would 
be proud of sharing the same platform, and also be aware of the fact 
that free labour doesn't exist. I'm always hoping that a more design/ 
marketing-oriented group or person would suddenly appear on the Daisy 
scene, but clearly that hasn't been the case so far.

Let's continue this conversation and see where it leads us to.

</Steven>
-- 
Steven Noels                            http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought                              Open Source Java & XML
stevenn at outerthought.org              Makers of the Daisy CMS
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