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Many years ago I worked at a DEC-shop. We used a tool called Document (as far as I remember) to create documentation. It was provided by DEC and created the same layout as the original DEC documentation. Which is as far as I'm concerned a milestone in layout and typesetting.

Researching the web I found a more or less obscure company which sells this tool for Open VMS. But I would prefer an open source replacement.

Any help ?

Greetings Till

Hein
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till.h
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3 Answers3

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Touch Technology was, and perhaps still is, an interesting company with interesting folks like 'Mr Dan'. They picked up a good bit of Digital software in a fire-sale and had some good stuff such themselves such as performance tuning tools and a 4GL (Intouch... available on OpenVMS Freeware). The company appears to have moved one, judging by their current website front door which does not dwell on the old stuff , but you could do worse than try contact them. The back door still list DECdocument: http://www.ttinet.com/documentation.html

Good luck! Hein

Hein
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  • Thank you very much for your answer. But I would like to have an at least similar tool running on more common systems like Unix-derivates. The idea is to use it for documenting current systems. I wouldn't base that on a legacy closed source system. – till.h Dec 03 '13 at 18:47
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If you're still looking for a solution, have you thought about LaTeX? The markup syntax isn't radically different from VAX DOCUMENT's SDML. They both have the same back-end; the final steps in processing an SDML file involved running it through TeX.

rnturn
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I would think the best solution would be DocBook, since it is also an SGML-ish format. You might be able to translate a substantial portion using XSS.

luskwater
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