On Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 11:39:05AM -0600, Chris Parker wrote: ... >I dislike having to install additional things just to read a manual page, >or to edit it. I'm just lazy I guess. :)
The whole object of SGML and DocBook is to allow one to maintain a single source from which one can produce html, text, or typeset text. Once converted to html, much of the interesting information is lost (such as the ability to create automatic indexes). I've got a script that creates normal html, single-document html (easier to search and print), and text output from DocBook SGML input. The fact that DocBook automatically handles table of contents and the Index makes it far more useful than if I had to do all this manually. I must admit that I write most of my documentation initially in vi with standard groff ``mm'' macros, and have written an mm2sgml script that does a pretty good job of translating. I find it a lot easier to handle lists and tables this way than writing sgml manually, and I've been doing documentation with the mm macros for the better part of 20 years so I'm more comfortable with it. As an amusing aside, I was talking to Phil Hughes, publisher of Linux Journal, this weekend, reminiscing about the early days of the Seattle Unix Group, where the original board members were etc., and he noted that one of the original board members who worked for Phil's company SSC as a writer is now at Microsoft doing technical writing. Her boss at Microsoft was talking to her, and asked what she was doing that made her five to six times more productive than anybody else on the team. Her reply was that she writes everything with vi, then converts to M$-Word before submitting it. Bill -- INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC UUCP: camco!bill PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way FAX: (206) 232-9186 Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676 URL: http://www.celestial.com/ ``Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.'' Will Rogers - List info/subscribe/unsubscribe? See http://www.freeradius.org/list/users.html
