jpn@teddy.UUCP (John P. Nelson) (11/09/88)
I am looking for information on software engineering-oriented
documentation systems.
We are currently using "troff" for all of our documents, occasionally
using "pic" to imbed pictures and diagrams (we have an internally written
tool that generates "pic" output). While this fills our needs for the
short term, I'm sure that there must be better solutions. We have over 50
diskless SUN workstations, and we would like to take advantage of the
CPU power at our disposal.
Most of the WYSIWYG documentation programs seem heavily oriented
towards producing end-user documentation. As engineers, we like to use
the information in our documents in various ways: not just as a
end-product hard-copy. Ideally, we would like to use some kind of CASE
system, but most of these seem like vaporware at the moment. Barring
that, we would like to use a document system with an open interface:
that lets us get information in and out of the system easily, (perhaps
storing the documents in some kind of database?) We would like to be
able to imbed pictures into our documents, but our needs are simple:
we mostly generate block diagrams, flow-charts, that sort of thing.
I would like to hear from anyone who is actually USING such a system,
along with it's pluses and minuses. If you did a comparison investigation
of several such systems, I'd really like to hear your conclusions. What
I don't need is to be swamped with more vaporware.
Thanks in advance. I'll summarize any results that I get (unless you
specificly ask me not to include your response).
--
john nelson
UUCP: {decvax,mit-eddie}!genrad!teddy!jpn
smail: jpn@teddy.genrad.com