Home Introduction Preface Do you need UDO?

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 German, English, French, Italian and Swedish texts. UDO knows how "Table of contents", "Appendix", "Figure" or "Table" is called in the other countries. 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.

When you have written an UDO source file you can convert it into the following formats:

  1. Apple QuickView
  2. ASCII
  3. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
  4. LaTeX 2.09, LaTeX2e
  5. Linuxdoc-SGML
  6. LyX
  7. Manualpage
  8. NROFF
  9. Pure C Help
  10. RTF (Rich Text Format)
  11. Source code (C and Pascal)
  12. ST-Guide
  13. Texinfo
  14. Turbo Vision Help
  15. Windows Help

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

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:


UDO is not the perfect program for all purposes. The conversion into ASCII, 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 near future.

There are some points that UDO can't manage yet but will be implemented in the very near future: a automatically generated index, list of figures and list of tables. Just wait some months and you will get UDO Release 7 with all these features.


To make complex files like newspapers that is impossible with UDO because it can't wrap text around images and it can't generated files with two or more text columns. In addition to that UDO hasn't got an implemented automatic syllabification.

UDO is just a "one way" converter. UDO can't convert LaTeX, HTML or RTF to the UDO format. It is only able to convert the UDO format into LaTeX etc. Maybe there will be a HTML2UDO or SGML2UDO converter in the near future.

To sum it up it can be said that UDO can't manage the following things and won't be able to manage them in the future:

  1. UDO can only convert its format into the upper standing formats. UDO can't convert them into its own format. Maybe there will be some other converters in the near future.
  2. UDO can't make binary formats (like WinWord documents). It can only make make formats that are based on ASCII.
  3. UDO doesn't support an automatic syllabification. You have to tell UDO explicitely where it is allowed to split up words. I don't want to implement an automatic syllabification because there are only some formats that would profit from it.
  4. UDO can't wrap text around images. UDO can't save multi-columned texts, too. These functions are part of desktop publishing and not of a software like UDO.

Home Introduction Preface Do you need UDO?