Hi Frank,

You are helping by just being here, I was getting lonesome :)

Good questions about the tools, I'll try to answer them. You wrote:

I am not talking about open sourcing the Solbook DTD
but just making it publicly available. That doesn't
necessarily mean open sourcing.

[mo] I see, thanks for the clarification, this is not in the current plans. 
There are some issues with this that are significant enough to have pushed me 
toward the path of XML and Docbook, in addition to some OS.o doc community 
members asking for DocBook compliant XML, but I will revisit my research notes 
and reply with more information.

So are these books authored in Docbook, not Solbook?

[mo] No, they are authored in Solbook, but we're working on a tool to convert 
the SGML source to Docbook compliant XML for use by the community. We are about 
80% there with a goal of March to complete.

Don't get me wrong, a complete style guide is a very useful thing
but not suited to get someone ramped up quickly. My experience with
OpenOffice shows that the volunteer writers from the community
want to produce results quickly. The condensed versions that
you mention above would be of great help to aid anyone to
produce documents quickly. The contributors' time is most
valuable since most of them will do the work in their spare time.

[mo] Thanks for this input, I appreciate you bringing the OpenOffice doc 
project experience to this forum. You rock. I'll keep this in mind as I develop 
the content, it is a different way to think about the goal--saving contributor 
time. Maybe a tutorial or slide show would be a good approach? If you or others 
in the community have a framework or ideas for the outline of this type of info 
that worked well for you, let me know. Keep it coming!

Regards,
Michelle
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