Re: Patches
Hi,
* Vincent Lefevre [06-05-06 20:18:50 +0200] wrote:
On 2006-05-05 09:46:56 +0000, Rocco Rutte wrote:
Maybe "layout" is the wrong word. DocBook is very much designed
towards HTML outpu
This is wrong. It is also used very much to produce PDF. DocBook is
designed to write documentation (hence the "Doc").
Hmm. I know that my ideas are sometimes very strange. But DocBook is
certainly not what I would use to produce PDF with.
For HTML it's okay since the actual "rendering" (paragraphs, line breaks
and all that) is up to the browser. But for PDF I wouldn't want to go
with FOP or the like. I prefer a TeX engine and TeX can be produced from
a custom XML dialect (getting the tables right generically from DocBook
is difficult).
For mutt-ng I hacked up XSL to do that:
<http://mutt-ng.berlios.de/manual/manual.pdf>
<http://mutt-ng.berlios.de/manual/manual.ps>
(If one is actually interested in that, the PS version has an index,
too, which would be hyperlinked in the PDF)
I think it needs it. Right now, the use of XML actually is heavy abuse.
I'd say the opposite. Reusing DTD's is one of the goals of XML.
I'm not that much of an XML expert. But aren't DTDs obsolete in favor of
more powerful validation techniques (since the DTD was there before
XML)?
Once we already have XML, we could use it to generate everything else
from it (muttrc(5), the manual, the template Muttrc file, etc). This
would allow us to have more powerful (and in the end more consistent)
documentation in init.h for the options.
Then propose a solution. But DocBook allows to do much more things
than generating HTML, possibly by extended it.
What else can you generate without pain (I consider the PDF output from
DocBook sources "pain" since I'm used to see TeX-generated PDF output)?
Is there even an easy way to generate plain text?
With Brendan I had a short discussion on IRC and he mentioned asciidoc
as an alternative. I haven't really used it but maybe that is an option,
too.
The real problem I think we have right now is that I see the need for
rethinking the way we generate docs in general while others (like you)
don't. I only mentioned a custom XML dialect as one possibility to make
writing documentation easier but am, of course, open to other ways such
as asciidoc. I just want to have a solution that is abstract enough to
easily generate all types of documentation from (and the kludge to use
w3m or lynx to dump the HTML manual to plain text is already a hint
that DocBook maybe lacks capabilities).
At least there's plenty of room for improvements (like replacing the
<screen/> sections in the manual by tables for the function reference,
etc.) so some smaller steps could be made without moving away from
DocBook...
bye, Rocco
--
:wq!