On 2005-12-03 @ 10:04:11 (week 48) Mark Schoonover wrote: > Thanks for the info!
You're welcome. > I didn't think about DocBook, I'll check that > out. My other option was to write a TT wrapper to use PDF::API2, and use > that. Your approach might be easier, I don't know. I started learning LaTeX, > but it's a bit difficult to get started. I'll check out DocBook and see how > difficult that is. I found that learning XML/XSL was very easy and it has helped me in other projects too. I think TeX is a fantastic tool, but in the environment where I work it is just too much of an unknown factor. XML is the buzzword for now and from what I have learned with good reason. I choose XML over TeX because of its flexibility and because I could easily re-use what I had learned for other purposes. DocBook is just a specific implementation of XML, that has been developed to meet the needs of people writing texts. For me it does all I need. > If you have an example template that I could use to > learn?? I'd really like to, but I am not allowed to. However no fear, DocBook is very well documented online. Here are the URLs I used to learn it: Web: http://docbook.org/ Web: http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/index.html Web: http://docbook.sourceforge.net/projects/xsl/ Web: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/docbook/chapter/book/docbook.html If you download the source distributions you'll find they contain examples to get you started. I also bought these books: O'Reilly - Learning XML (ISBN0596000464) O'Reilly - Learning XSLT (ISBN0596003277) O'Reilly - DocBook: The Definitive Guide (ISBN1565925807) Sagehill Enterprises - DocBook XSL: The Complete Guide (ISBN0974152110) I can really recommend that last one! Very readable and full of good information! Essentially you use TT just like you were used to with HTML. Only now the output is XML. You just generate a special form of text as output and wrap the whole thing in a script that first uses TT to generate the DocBook output from your templates. Next you use various CLI commands to transform the DocBook files into the other formats. I tend to go for the Java implementations, because I work in a hybrid environment (*nix and Win32). Apart from the books I bought the Oxygen editor (available for both platforms mentioned above). I found it made my life sufficiently easier to spend the money on it (I never regretted it). You could use just about any editor for it (I preferred vim), but the additional tools targetted at specific XML stuff (for example a DTD checker) in a dedicated editor made learning all this a lot easier for me. However there are good OSS XML editors available, so you could use one of those too. To me learning XML/XSL proofed to be easier than learning TeX, but that could be just me. I have nothing against Tex, as a matter of fact I have a lot of respect for it. It just wasn't the tool I thought would meet my needs best. HTH Grx HdV _______________________________________________ templates mailing list [email protected] http://lists.template-toolkit.org/mailman/listinfo/templates
