Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996 18:52:51 +0200 (MET DST) From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) To: jfieber@indiana.edu (John Fieber) Cc: doc@FreeBSD.org (FreeBSD Documenters) Subject: Re: Linuxdoc Message-ID: <199606061652.SAA03920@allegro.lemis.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.93.960606104256.422A-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu> from "John Fieber" at Jun 6, 96 10:53:50 am
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
John Fieber writes: > > On Thu, 6 Jun 1996, Greg Lehey wrote: > >>> I think this will be relatively painless to do at the DTD >>> level and I already have some primitive cals table -> html >>> conversion stuff for instant. I could probably hack the >>> cals -> LaTeX, but would definately need help with cals -> >>> groff. >> >> I think the things you say later on make this a waste of effort. If > > How so? If we ultimately end up with Docbook, formatting of > tables will already be done. See the next point. >>> important because the Handbook is over 350 pages and the >>> prospect of converting it to another DTD is not something >>> i'm looking forward to doing. I think it ultimately will >>> happen, but not this week. >> >> Does it all have to happen at once? > > Hmm... Not necessairly, but incremental changes would have to be > applied horizontally across the whole document---while having > some sections written up in docbook and others in linuxdoc may be > possible, it would be orders of magnitude more difficult than > making changes all at once. We need to discuss that statement. I don't see that it's true. Sure, each file should have only one kind of format, but the individual files could have different formats. At the moment, we have one of at least three possible transformations: .sgml->.html, .sgml->.tex, .sgml->.mm (or whatever). What we need to do is to agree on a different file name extension for the DocBook or the latexdoc stuff (say, change .sgml to .ldoc for the latexdoc stuff), and then we have three additional transformations .ldoc->.html, .ldoc->.tex, .ldoc->.mm. This is rather like what I'm doing in the latest version of my book, in which I have .ms, .man and .tex files. > I think it would be most efficient to carve out a chunk of time and > grind it all through more or less at once. I need to spend some more > time studying the docbook dtd. I think instant could do most of the > conversion, but I'm not sure what the magnitude of the manual > cleanup will be. The task of actually taking advantage of the > docbook features will take a long time but can be done on an "as > time allows" schedule. The thought of doing that horrifies me. If you want, go ahead, but I'm sure that the other way would make more sense. In fact, with a bit of thought, it might be possible to allow files of different formats to coexist, as long as there is a defined way of converting them to HTML. >> I currently have my "how to add a second disk" half finished, and >> the prospect of finishing it completely with the current DTD scares >> me. It would be nice to be able to mix the linuxdoc DTD and (for >> example) DocBook in the sources. That would make transition much >> easier, too. > Mix and match is only possible if you hawe two well designed, > modular DTDs. I must be missing something here. If I am, please fill me in. > Unfortunately one of the DTDs in question doesn't quite fit that > model (and you can guess which one it is!) I can think of at least one :-) Greg
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199606061652.SAA03920>