David Douthitt wrote from several messages: > > I've decided I need to revisit the LEAF Developer's Guide, > and want to know what I need to do to make it ready for > this "DocBook" format. > > On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 11:55:30PM -0700, Greg Morgan wrote: > > Mike Noyes wrote quoting Julian Church: > > > > The normal formats are: html, pdf, plain text, and PostScript. > > Side Note: Under the GFDL, PDF and PostScript are Opaque formats, > and HTML and Text are Transparent. Does this affect anything?
I don't believe so. Gnome uses docbook for everything they do. If you make the docbook file available it won't be Opaque. The other file formats then would be a service to your readers should they prefer pdf, etc. The ramp up to get all the tools and understanding is the most difficult problem. Once there you can convert the file to most anything you want--opaque or not opaque. Here's a good tutorial and an example of presenting several of the different formats at the beginning of a web page for the reader to pick from. Moreover, it shows most of the conversion tools in action on the hello world document. http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/mydocs/docbook-intro.html > > > Later Linux distributions have all the docbook tools already. > > I see that DocBook (v3.1) exists for Red Hat 6.2; will this > be sufficient? Do I have to upgrade? Will new versions work > on Red Hat 6.2? I believe like Julian Church pointed out the later rpms should work because several of them just provide text files. The text files are Document Type Definitions, DTDs. I believe that the conversion utilities found in the other docbook i386.rpms should work just fine. I don't think there's much rocket science to the code. > > I just installed Red Hat 6.2 and Oxygen onto separate partitions > on a Compaq 4000N for development. Nice little boxes! > > I kept looking for ways to use current word processing tools to create > these - but I can't find a lot. There's YAWC for Word - but that's > not GPL and requires administrator priviledges - I'm not willing to > go that far on my box. > Try abiword. I saw a Linux Journal review of abiword. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5795"; Abiword reads in rtf and exports docbook. For fun I read in developer.rtf and saved it as docbook. The only concern here is that when I read the document in again, abiword said it was invalid. However, the ?xml line could be pointing to the wrong DTD or the rtf conversion left an unclosed tag. vimming or lessing the file shows a standard xml file, however. I played with the file some and found one error in the GPL ending part of the document. It may have been easier to whack the GPL and add it in later. I didn't have the heart to tell Julian. abiword also has the red underline thing going for poor spellers like me. I even did my section of the budget for work in abiword. I exported the file in rtf. My boss read it in with no problems. > Then there's a RTF-to-DocBook converter - but it isn't free. If you have access to an MS Windows platform I found another combo-tool called Jacob and Majix described at http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-tipword.html?e. The ibm link describes the jacob and MajiX conversion method. I see allot of possibilities for this at work. Users store all sorts of data in word documents that they then want me to store in an Oracle database. I can run the conversion and then write Simple API for XML, SAX, programs with JDBC calls to do this. Just for grins I ran developer.rtf through MajiX. All the data was magically extracted. This one's free. > Another question - how well does DocBook formatting translate to > physical book form? Have any books been published this way? Try "Building Oracle XML Applications" on O'Reilly Press. Of all the books I scanned this one has the best teaching approach. Steve Muench wrote the whole book using XMetal. He shows a picture of the editor in action on page 9. He talked about using docbook, but I didn't pay attention until now. ;-) The "Python and XML" book is a good reference but is numbing to try and read--ok it sucks. I am sorting out all my tools right now. I may use a combination of vim and abiword. docbook will be a vehicle to explore areas of vim I've never gone into. Here's some tools I have found. http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?tip_id=290 vim spell check http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?script_id=38 docbook tag entry http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?script_id=301 % movement in tags? http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?script_id=90 cvs interface http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?script_id=164 html macros http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?script_id=258 html macros http://vim.sourceforge.net/tips/tip.php?script_id=30 python http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gdp/handbook/gdp-handbook Gnome documentation handbook but I found it helpful to read http://www.tldp.org/LDP/LDP-Author-Guide/writing-docbook.html with the Gnome guide. They both seemed to completement each other. http://old.lwn.net/2000/features/DocBook/ another tutorial. http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hoenicka_markus/ntsgml.html the cygwin approach or win32. I know the big problem I am facing right now is time just to pull it all together and do something useful. :) There's a fairly complete brain dump of what I know and some of my experiences. I hope it helps. Greg Morgan ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by: OSDN - Tired of that same old cell phone? Get a new here for FREE! https://www.inphonic.com/r.asp?r=sourceforge1&refcode1=vs3390 _______________________________________________ Leaf-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-devel
