What UDO can('t) do for you

UDO has been originally developed to make it easier for you to write software documentations or other kinds of text files that have to be available in more than one format.

UDO can be a great help if you want to make a single destination format, too. A beginner will have less problems when learning the UDO syntax instead of learning LaTeX or HTML. So if you want to make LaTeX or HTML files it should be easier to get to know how to make them using UDO instead of writing them on your own. When writing LaTeX or HTML files you have to keep attention not to use any of their special command characters. In comparison to that UDO will convert these special characters for you when converting the source file to LaTeX or HTML. But this is not the only thing UDO can do for you.

UDO is a multilingual program. You can make texts in different languages. UDO knows how Table of contents, Appendix, Figure or Table is called in the other supported languages. The date is also printed out in the right way depended of the selected language.

The syntax of UDO is easy to learn. To make some small documentations you just have to learn about ten to fifteen commands; as many as you have to learn when you try to learn LaTeX or HTML.

Having written an UDO source file, you can convert it into the following formats:

As you can see some formats are just interesting for specific systems/platforms, but you can also see that the list contains come formats that can be used on nearly any existing system/platform.

In most cases UDO doesn't make files that are ready to use because have to run a further software to view, print or convert the document. E.g. you have to convert the Windows Help source file (saved by UDO) with the Microsoft Help Compiler HC.EXE into a Windows Help file. Or you have to import the RTF file into a text processor to print it.

UDO tries to help the author of a documentation as much as possible. Next to the conversion into the destination format UDO offers you the following features:

• automatically generated title pages, tables of contents, head lines and bottom lines,
• chapter numbering,
• tables,
• automatically generated hypertext links,
• support for different text styles,
• automatic conversion of umlauts and other special characters,
• a large variety of layout commands for making lists, enumerations, descriptions, justified text, centered or indented text or text with a right alignment,
• image support,
• automatic line breaks with a half-automatic Hyphenation.

UDO is not the perfect program for all purposes. The conversion to ASCII-text, ST-Guide, HTML, LaTeX and Windows Help is nearly perfect. Some formats (like Linuxdoc-SGML and LyX) are quite young and haven't been tested enough. You will surely find some aspects that have to be changed in the future.

There are some points that UDO cannot manage yet but will be found on the wishlist: an automatically generated index, list of figures and list of tables.

To make complex files like newspapers is impossible with UDO because it cannot wrap text around images and it cannot generate files with two or more text columns. These functions are part of desktop publishing and not of a software like UDO.

UDO doesn't support an automatic Hyphenation. You have to tell UDO explicitely where it is allowed to split up words.

UDO is just a one way converter which converts it is own format into the formats listed above. UDO cannot convert them into its own format.