Document Management Suggestions

Rails
1

I am looking to create an intranet document management solution that
would
take advantage of Ruby/Rails/Subversion etc.

I want to get away from document management using MS Word, Excel etc.

Can anyone recommend a direction I should investigate?

I am currently gathering information on Docbook, Latex, ODF,ODT,ODG,ODP,
TinyMCE and others as I find them.

Ideally I would like to convert manuals that are several hundred pages
long
in MS Word format into a format that lends itself to be managed under
Subversion. I would like to be able to compare revisions side by side
and
see exactly who made what changes. I would also like to be able to
derive
different end user formatted documents from one source document i.e.
Docbook
–> pdf or html or wml etc…

Is anyone doing this currently and can you point me to some reading
material
for accomplishing this under RoR. I do not mind doing the work as Rails
has
been a joy to use so far in my limited experiences as a ROR newbie!

Thanks!

M.W.

2

I would highly recommend Textile (redcloth) 1 or Markdown
(bluecloth) 2. It should be quite reasonable to programmatically
convert from Word to (export-style) HTML and then to either format.
Things like complex tables that can’t be rendered in mark* can remain
as HTML. These formats do a particularly good job with diffs (as
viewed from version control), since the plain text formats are so
readable. They then render into attractive XHTML or PDF… I would
recommend markdown because I find it’s plaintext more readable and
editable 3. Note that the One Encyclopedia Per Child (part of
the One Laptop Per Child) project is going with markdown. Here are
other options [5].

[5[: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Comparison_of_document_markup_languages

        - dan

–
Dan K. mailto:[email protected]
http://www.dankohn.com/ tel:+1-415-233-1000