On 18/02/11 23:15, Shlomi Fish wrote:
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.)?
I'm happy to consider any patches. My knowledge of right-to-left languages is
zero so it would be up to other users to review and comment.
See also http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/index.html#_patches_and_bug_reports
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.
Thanks for pointing that out. I tried it on the example article and it seemed to
work (there were a couple of validation errors in the db5 though):
$ asciidoc -bdocbook article.txt
$ xsltproc /usr/share/xml/docbook/stylesheet/docbook5/db4-upgrade.xsl
article.xml >article.db5
$ xmllint --noout --relaxng /usr/share/xml/docbook/schema/rng/5.0/docbook.rng
article.db5
Cheers, Stuart
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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