Metanorma
Metanorma project summary
Name
Metanorma
Purpose
This is a tool to help you create a standard in a format approved by the standards committee. You do this by taking a template created for this particular kind of standard, and filling it in. Thus, Metanorma can check that everything necessary is present and formatted right.
Description
This evaluation comes from a meeting that Beth Hancock and Andy Oram held with Ronald Tse on November 3, 2020.
Metanorma runs through command-line tools. There doesn't seem to be a WYSIWYG interface. There seems to be no provision for integrating it with another system such as GitLab, but I imagine one could write calls directly to Metanorma's Ruby functions.
Currently Metanorma has no support for IEEE standards, but it has been adopted by many major standrards organizations. It offers some documentation for creating a new layout (which they call a "flavor"), and it seems well-written with lots of examples.
Input is enhanced Asciidoc, which of course is slightly different from the Markdown used on the IEEE SA Open site--not a significant problem. Metanorma Supports AsciiMath, which is an enhancement to AsciiDoc and is translated to MathML for integration into Metanorma's HTML.
"It is assumed that you are familiar with HTML markup, CSS styling, and basics of programming with Ruby." (You also create a YAML file.)
"Output in HTML, PDF and DOC formats with the flexibility to tune the appearance of rendered documents to align with your organization’s requirements and branding." Metanorma does this through Ruby gems such as html2doc and something called XslfoPdf. I found an html2odt gem, so adding it to Metanorma shouldn't be hard.
There are a few common elements in their template, such as a cover page and intro page.
Metanorma integrates with Relaton for bibliographies.
IEEE SA OPEN deployment
I don't know whether IEEE has a single established format for standards, or even whether it defines the formats of standards in sufficient precision to create a template.
Tse told us that the IEEE 802 group is in discussion with the Metanorma project. The 802 is a major, highly visible standards committee, responsible for standardizing Ethernet and the wireless protocols popularly known as WiFi, among other things. We are trying to establish contact with the appropriate people in the 802 standards group.
Indications of maturity level
Their blog's most recent entry was about six weeks before I'm writing this, and the blog looks active.
GitHub stats:
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Version 1.0.0 was released this past March
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17 watches
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28 stars
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19 forks
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31 open issues and 63 closed issues. The most recent closed issue is this past July.
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43 closed pull requests and no open ones.
The GitHub wiki has just a couple work items.
I couldn't find a mailing list or forum.