Gary Schnabl wrote, regarding a discussion taking place on the doc-...@ooo list:
BTW, FrameMaker 7.0 is available for the Macintosh. And recent UNIX versions of FrameMaker are also available. Anything in the FM7 series should be cheap via eBay. FrameMaker 8 or 9 would not be necessary for DocBook, as even the "ancient" (still used in some houses) pre-2002 FM 6 would suffice.
UNIX isn't Linux. Do any versions work on Linux? When you say "cheap", what approximate price do you mean? Can people outside the US also get FM cheap?
Google "XML editors" for searching several free or cheap shareware XML editors (48,000 hits--add freeware and there are still 16,000 hits).
It's been awhile since I looked for "free or cheap XML editors" so perhaps things have changed. In my experience, the free or cheap ones were far from easy to use for anyone not familiar with, and comfortable working with, XML code. Any program that provided a reasonably WYSIWYG front-end, and was therefore easy to use, was expensive. If something that fits my criteria has shown up in the past year or so, I would genuinely like to hear about it.
Just get the appropriate DocBook DTD or other schema and start converting any OOo documents into DocBook XML.
Someone would have to find -- or set up -- "the appropriate DocBook DTD or other schema" and make it, plus instructions on what to do with it, available to anyone who wanted to do this. I vaguely know what a schema is, but haven't a clue how to choose one, put it to use, or explain to anyone else how to use it. I've actually wanted to learn about this, and write about it, for some time, but I don't even know where to start. The last time I looked, the explanations I found made no sense to me; they relied on prior knowledge that I don't have.
However, a very detailed OOo-to-DocBook style guide would be necessary so that useful structured documents result.
What would this involve? Who would produce it? How would it be applied and by whom? It sounds to me like another big hurdle, but I'd like to be wrong. Barriers may not be insurmountable, but they are still barriers. And even if we all thought your idea was the way to go, *someone* would have to lead the rest of us by the hand, in order to implement the idea. --Jean
