On 9/15/15 8:43 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
Jim Nasby <jim.na...@bluetreble.com> writes:
I'm not sure SGML is the way to go anymore anyways. Asciidoc offers a
lot of what our SGML does in a much easier to support toolchain. It's
also natively supported by github, which makes it nice for others to
view the output (see [1] as an exmaple). If asciidoc isn't powerful
enough for what you need you can switch to asciidoctor which is even
more powerful[2].

AFAICT from a quick look at its documentation, asciidoc can produce
either html or docbook output; so as soon as you want something other
than html output (in particular, PDF), you're back to relying on the
exact same creaky docbook toolchain we use now.  Only with one extra
dependency in front of it.

Personally I never look at anything but the HTML rendering, but I doubt
that dropping support for all other output formats would fly :-(

I do agree that the SGML toolchain is getting pretty long in the tooth
and we need to be looking for something else.

I wasn't thinking of trying to replace the Postgres toolchain, but...

a2x (http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/a2x.1.html) states that it can generate "PDF, EPUB, DVI, PS, LaTeX, XHTML (single page or chunked), man page, HTML Help or plain text formats using asciidoc(1) and other applications (see REQUISITES section). SOURCE_FILE can also be a DocBook file with an .xml extension."

What I expect would be a lot more effort is actually converting all the SGML to asciidoc. A quick google search doesn't turn up anything promising.

If the only bad part of our current toolchain is PDF then perhaps we should just rethink how that's being generated. Since a2x can take docbook input maybe that's the way to go. But my understanding was that we've modified docbook and that's where part of the pain is coming from? In that case a full-out migration to asciidoc might be better.
--
Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting, Austin TX
Experts in Analytics, Data Architecture and PostgreSQL
Data in Trouble? Get it in Treble! http://BlueTreble.com


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