On 2013-08-14 10:03-0700 Alan W. Irwin wrote:

> My next step is to look at generating our info documentation using the
> xmlto approach.

That remark was due to two misconceptions on my part.  In fact, xmlto
has no ability to generate info format, but it doesn't matter because
our present docbook2x method of generating the documentation in info
format is based on XSLT style sheets, i.e., it is a modern XML/XSLT
method that does not need replacing.  However, as a result of
reviewing how we generate the info form I noticed a utf8 encoding
option for one of the docbook2x commands that we use.  So I tried that
and it worked!  The result is Table 3-4 now (revision 12483) contains
good-looking Greek characters (rather than written out alpha, beta,
etc.) in the info form of our documentation which is a nice
improvement.

So here is where this project stands now:

The man and info parts of our documentation generation are fine as
they are since they both use modern XML/XSLT rather than
dead/old-fashioned SGML/DSSSL.  The xmlto approach (which uses
XML/XSLT) gives good results for the HTML, PDF, and PostScript parts
of our documentation generation. However, the results use a default
style which is quite bland looking. The xmlto script also claims to
generate DVI, but there is a bug in that at the moment (at least for
version 0.0.25 of xmlto that is installed on Debian wheezy).

My next step is to deprecate the SGML backend tools to generate HTML,
PDF, PostScript, and DVI in our build system.  Instead of those I will
introduce as default into our build system the xmlto alternatives for
producing all of those backend formats (with DVI as an option that is
turned off by default until the upstream bug in xmlto concerning dvi
generation can be fixed).  The resulting HTML, PDF, PostScript, and
(eventually) DVI results will have an extremly bland style.  That
style is probably okay for the near term, but eventually we should
learn to update that style to something much nicer using standard and
well-maintained XSLT capabilities that are described in TCG
<http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/>.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
__________________________

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