Hi Mr. Rackham,

thanks for your response. See below for mine.

On Thursday 17 Feb 2011 22:12:58 Stuart Rackham wrote:
> On 17/02/11 21:30, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I've been enjoying using AsciiDoc for the user-documentation of Freecell
> > Solver ( http://fc-solve.berlios.de/ ). I've picked up AsciiDoc so I can
> > convert the fc-sovle documentation with relative ease to DocBook/XML
> > (which is a relatively rare feature among all lightweight markup
> > languages), and it worked nicely. Its AsciiDocs are in English, though
> > now a contributor has begun translating them to Dutch.
> > 
> > In any case, I've written or started to write some
> > stories/novellas/novels and some screenplays in these dedicated
> > lightweight markup languages which I've implemented that convert them to
> > a custom XML format and from it to DocBook and/or XHTML:
> > 
> > * http://freshmeat.net/projects/xml-grammar-fiction
> > 
> > (A known issue with the screenplays is that their output format is a
> > popular one among some Internet screenplays I've seen an not the one
> > enforced by Holywood and other film studios.)
> > 
> > I've been thinking of using AsciiDoc at least instead of the -Fiction
> > part, but I see two possible issues:
> > 
> > 1. Some of my stories are in Hebrew and I need good support for
> > bidirectional scripts. The words "hebrew", "arabic", "direction",
> > "bidi", "rtl", "ltr", etc. do not appear in the AsciiDoc documentation
> > even once, so I don't know if it's possible there. If you believe it is,
> > let me know. I suppose AsciiDoc supports Unicode and I can insert the
> > special unicode bidirectional characters (e.g: LRM, RLM, POP, etc.).
> > However, all of these should be mentioned somewhere in the
> > documentation.
> 
> There is no explicit bidirectional support in AsciiDoc.
> 

I see. Would you accept a patch that will add one where appropriate 
(documentation, test code, production code and everything.)?

> > 2. I believe DocBook 5.x has better Bidi and Right-to-left languages
> > support than DocBook 4.x, but AsciiDoc does not appear to support it.
> > Will a patch that adds support for DocBook 5.x (or replaces the DocBook
> > 4.x support with it - it's your call) will be accepted?
> 
> In theory all that's necessary is to write a docbook50.conf backend
> configuration file. Out of interest I made a start last year, I thought it
> would be a trivial exercise but it quickly degenerated into a can of
> worms: you need a DocBook 5 specific toolchain to process it and the
> semantically tighter DocBook 5 makes markup generation difficult. DocBook
> 5 brings nothing new to AsciiDoc so I put it aside.
> 

Ah. Well, there's a DocBook 4->DocBook 5 XSLT stylesheet I think. I personally 
prefer DB5 over DB4 because many things are more consistent there (e.g: xlink 
based href's) and it also has some features that I miss in it.

> Here are my (very rough and unchecked) notes and I've attached my wholly
> incomplete docbook50.conf file. If you do create working docbook50.conf
> file we could look at including it in the distribution as an
> ``experimental'' backend.

Thanks! I might work on it. ("When a FOSS developer says he'll do something, 
he or she means 'maybe'." as I once said in 
http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/osp_rules.html ).

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

> 
> 8<--------
> DocBook 5
> ---------
> 
> - See http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/ProcesingDb5.htm
> - Ubuntu DocBook 5 specific  packages: docbook5-xml, docbook-xsl-ns
> - See docbook50.conf, it's nowhere near finished.
> 
> To validate use RelaxNG schema e.g.
> 
>    xmllint --noout --relaxng
>    /usr/share/xml/docbook/schema/rng/5.0/docbook.rng doc/article.xml
> 
> NOTE: Don't use the --valid option as this causes xmllint to look for
> an external DTD and you will get a 'Validation failed: no DTD found'
> error.
> 
> DocBook 5 is not as relaxed as DocBook 4 e.g.
> 
> - 'abstract' must occur inside 'info', cannot appear like section.
> - Admonitions can't occur in 'article' element.
> - Doesn't like preamble to proceed first section.
> 8<--------
> 
> 
> Cheers, Stuart
> 
> > ----------------
> > 
> > That put aside, I've been playing with the idea of adding more "artsy"
> > tags to DocBook/5.x to allow for writing fiction and stories with ease
> > using it. I've already written the novella
> > http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/human-hacking/ using DocBook/XML and
> > also made the original DocBook available, but trying to use DocBook/XML
> > for screenplays failed spectacularly. But it is not directly related to
> > the point of my suggestions for the improvement of AsciiDoc.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > 
> >     Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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