On 07/31/2018 04:59 PM, Marcin Cieslak wrote:
On Tue, 31 Jul 2018, Jon Trulson wrote:
So - is anyone on this list familiar with docbook XML want to take up the task
of upgrading our documentation format and generation to something from this
decade?
Short term, using a new onsgmls is probably the way to go, but long term, it
seems clear we need to update to a proper, modern docbook XML.
I have zero clue about DtInfo and stuff, but I did some armchair grep
research...
Same here, I spent a couple hours trying to understand this stuff a
little better.
Fortunately, there are a variety of online books on docbook, like this one:
https://tdg.docbook.org/tdg/5.1/
We seem to be using docbook v2 or 3, I'm not sure. nsgmls v1.1.
Do we have "CDE: Information Manager Author's and Programmer's
Guide" somewhere? - I see only "Help System Author's and Programmer's Guide"
listed on a wiki).
Indeed we do. You can access it in dtinfo via -> CDE Documentation ->
CDE Information System Author's and Programmers Guide
The book's SGML source is in doc/C/guides/infoAPg .
CDE 2.1 release boasts that DtInfo could be even made to work with different
SGML DTDs,
not only DocBook, so it is probably a pretty generic SGML tool.
It seems that the documentation's SGML is almost the same as DocBook XML (XML
is a subset of SGML),
so they could be converted easily, but what about stylesheets and DTDs?
Yes, there apparently is a tool that can do simple conversions directly
to XML. Though over the versions, they have added, renamed, and removed
some tags. I don't know if CDE's docs strayed from the standards, or
did something weird.
There is a dtinfoStyle.dtd installed, which is an SGML DTD.
We have a compontent called "mmdb" and "DtMmdb" - whatever it is doing, it has
scary-looking
"StyleSheet" directories. Is it for processing SGML stylesheets?
The MultiMedia Database. Not familiar with it's functions either.
I don't know who DtHelp is related (the distiction was always confusing me even
in my
orignal CDE days) but it seems it also uses some SGML internally.
DtHelp and the man pages are generated from sgml src via
programs/dtdocbook/doc2sdl and doc/util/dbtoman respectively.
I think help generation goes through multiple passes.
How much internally DtInfo format is based on SGML and its style sheets?
Would that mean we would have to teach it to undrstand RELAX NG schemas or
whatever
XML brings to have the docs in XML?
Not a clue. I think ultimately we would want it to generate HTML and
just use a web browser for both help and the guides.
At least in the simple case. There is also dtsearch/dtmmdb which fits
into all this somewhere as well.
But a conversion to XML for the documents themselves seems quite
possible with some inevitable tweaking.
--
Jon Trulson
"Fire all weapons and open a hailing frequency for my victory yodle."
- Zapp Brannigan
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