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Re: Patches



On 2006-05-07 10:44:12 +0000, Rocco Rutte wrote:
> Hmm. I know that my ideas are sometimes very strange. But DocBook is 
> certainly not what I would use to produce PDF with.

Is there any reason?

> 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 

Well, you can use a TeX engine to parse XML (e.g. xmltex).

> a custom XML dialect (getting the tables right generically from DocBook 
> is difficult).

and rewrite everything from scratch, even things you don't control
(e.g., an indexer that understands DocBook).

> >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)?

Yes, but I could have said the same thing for any other schema.

> 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?

I think this is generally done with a docbook -> html conversion first,
since it is easier to write. There are also docbook2man, docbook2texi,
and docbook2odf (DocBook to OpenDocument). You'll get other information
here: http://www.docbook.org/

> 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.

DocBook has more semantics, and has the advantage to be processed by
many XML tools.

> 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).

I don't think so. What would be the gain with a docbook -> plain text
direct convertor? IMHO, it would be better to improve w3m or lynx (with
CSS capabilities and so on -- BTW, with CSS, you wouldn't need HTML any
more, as CSS could be applied to DocBook directly).

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / SPACES project at LORIA