Hi Frank,

Using docbook/SGML for this and turning it into book-style; assuming I'd

There isn't much difference, but we have standardized on DocBook/XML in the community so if you want to use our community toolchain you'll need to use DocBook/XML. I use 4.4, the toolchain works with 5.0pre4 also, though you need the DTD schema which isn't fully supported with 5.0 as we haven't put together a RelaxNG toolchain yet.

For converting to DocBook, I have a heavily hacked up version of an XSL file I found on the DocBook Wiki which will do the heavy lifting of converting HTML into DocBook. Since DocBook tags convey the semantics rather than the formatting there is a good deal of additional editing required, but it at least gets the paragraph and section handling out of the way.

The redistribution terms for DocBook appear to be pretty liberal so I'm planning on putting together a toolchain package you can just grab and install from the community page. I imagine you'll find it useful. :)

go for this, is it possible to embed hyperlinks, both to other sections of the article series and to actual sourcecode on cvs.opensolaris.org ?

Yes -- DocBook supports many different link tag types, including hyperlinks, cross reference links, and olinks. olinks are the most flexible as they resolve through a lookup table, so you can change the link depending on the output format type -- think PDF versus delivering multiple HTML files in multiple directories, where one format is a cross reference but the other output format generates a hyperlink. You can get as complex or as simple as you like.

On reviewing, cut&pasting it all from the blog entries into a single file makes it very hard to maintain for me (and doubly hard to split up again afterwards). My UNIX-utils-for-textprocessing knowledge is a bit stale - does anyone know a simple preprocessor that substitutes nothing but '#include "...."' so that I can create the "all in one" file/TOC simply by concatenating the sections ? What would I use ? Maybe I should just shellscript that ...

The XML processor supports multiple files. I would suggest having one file per chapter or section, though you can split it up however you like.

Here's a sample from the index file of a project design document that I have in the works:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE book
        PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.4//EN"
        "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.4/docbookx.dtd"; [
        <!ENTITY % params SYSTEM "params.mod">
        %params;
        <!ENTITY titlepg SYSTEM "title.xml">
        <!ENTITY intro SYSTEM "intro.xml">
...
        <!ENTITY glossary SYSTEM "glossary.xml">
]>
<book><title>&doctitle;</title>
&titlepg;
&intro;
..
&glossary;
</book>

If you find the XML entity syntax a little off-putting (which some people do -- I like the modularity it provides myself) the xsltproc processor supports the XInclude standard for XML. The source tarballs for the various books released on the docs community page use XInclude rather than entities to concatenate the chapters.

Another option might be to (ab-)use the genunix.org OpenSolaris Wiki and put the articles there. What do you folks think about that idea ? Wiki would be a simple way for change tracking and article review ...

The Wiki seems like a fine tool for working on a draft version. :)

- Eric
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