H1: SDF in the real world

H2: How stable is SDF?

Other than some syntax changes introduced in 2.000beta10
to make SDF more palatable for users of Perl's POD format,
the core SDF code hasn't changed much since early 1996.
Within Mincom, people have been using SDF on a daily
basis for at least 4 or 5 years now.


H2: How many people are using SDF?

At the moment (February 98), my guess is that SDF has 50-100
users within [[Mincom]] and a few hundred within other organisations.
Excluding Mincom, SDF has active users within a large number of countries
including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, Germany, France, Italy,
New Zealand, Norway, Russia and the USA.


H2: What is SDF being used for?

Within [[Mincom]], SDF is used for a large number of purposes including:

* The user documentation for Mincom's flagship product, MIMS Open Enterprise.
  This is a large documentation suite containing over 11,000
  A4 pages and over 10,000 HTML topics with over 144,000
  hypertext jumps. All of the hypertext is automatically
  generated, greatly reducing the maintenance cost of
  the online documentation.

* All of the documents produced by the MIMS Technology Research (MTR)
  group within the last 3 years, i.e. a few hundred documents, and
  a Web-based project information system for all MTR projects.
  (The MTR group is the home of SDF.)

* Embedded documentation within C and C++ code.

* Documentation for Delphi components developed in-house.

* Documentation for Perl modules developed in-house.

* The documentation for SDF itself.

Outside of Mincom, SDF is also used for many things including:

* The SSLeay FAQ ({{http://www.psy.uq.edu.au/~ftp/Crypto/}})

* All of the documentation produced by Cryptsoft Pty Ltd
  ({{http://www.cryptsoft.com}})

* Documentation for the Ultimate editor
  ({{http://http://www.ufs.com.au/}})

* The Fulcrum Consulting Group ({{http://www.fulcrum.com.au}}) are using SDF
  for automatically generating periodic customer reports for
  publishing in a variety of formats, and also for internal procedures.

* Lots of other interesting things I'm unable to mention
  until I get permission to do so.

Note: If you are using SDF and would like to be mentioned above,
send me some email.

SDF can also be used to convert documentation in Perl's POD
format to any output format supported by SDF. For example,
the HTML produced by SDF for Perl's documentation is available
at {{http://www.mincom.com/mtr/perl/catalog.html}}.


H2: What new developments are expected for SDF in the future?

My current priorites are:

^ Supporting existing SDF users (by email and bug fixes).
+ Developing the next generation of SDF called {{PRD:SimpleDoc}}.

The key objectives of SimpleDoc are:

* upwards compatibility with SDF
* a new architecture which supports:
  - multiple input parsers (SDF, XML and POD)
  - output formatters which are decoupled from the input format
* Perl 5 modules
* better performance
* support for XML output (in addition to XML input)
* support for HTML-Help output
* support for Java-Help output
* better LaTeX output.

As always, my time is limited, so if one or more of the above features
interests you, let me know so I can prioritise things accordingly.

Further information on SimpleDoc is available on the web. The URL is
{{http://www.mincom.com/mtr/simpledoc/}}.