Date: Wed, 5 Jun 1996 11:15:36 +0100 From: Paul Richards <p.richards@elsevier.co.uk> To: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> Cc: doc@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: How do I write this SGML stuff? Message-ID: <199606051015.LAA21049@tees> In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.93.960604152205.422O-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu> References: <199606041714.TAA13705@allegro.lemis.de> <Pine.NEB.3.93.960604152205.422O-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu>
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>>>>> "John" == John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> writes: John> On Tue, 4 Jun 1996, Greg Lehey wrote: >> I've just been trying to convert my roff text on installing a >> second disk into SGML, and I find that I don't have any >> documentation. I've guessed a lot from the table sources, but I've >> probably made a lot of mistakes, and I can't find how to do >> pictures and tables. John> This is a bit of a dilemma. Currently the handbook is made John> readable by the lowest common denominator, which means lynx, John> which means no tables or graphics. Adding support for tables John> would be trivial. In fact, it should already work for LaTeX John> output, but I have not actually tried it. The (lame) workaround John> is ascii graphics in a <verb></verb> element. >> If there's no easy way to do that in SGML, is there a way to import >> PostScript? That would do just as easily. If somebody can point >> me to documentation on the subject, I'd be grateful. John> There is some documentation in /usr/src/share/sgml/FreeBSD/doc. John> It needs to be changed to reflect how things really are, but it John> should give you the basics. Just ignore all the stuff on the John> mechanics of making the conversions. Umm, this isn't really in the spirit of SGML. You shouldn't worry *AT ALL* about the output format, that's the whole point. If you want to mark the objects of your documents in some sensible way then you should just do so. There's no problem with tables or images or anything else you might want (I'm working in publishing at the moment, SGML conversion is what I have to battle with every day amongst other things and we publish technical journals so math, tables, images and all sorts of weird characters are the norm). Just create a DTD that has all the elements that we might need in our documentation and then worry about the output formats *after*. It's not that difficult to develop suitable mappings for any tags you might decide to use. LaTeX is particularly easy to cope with, groff is failry easy and html kind of varies depending on what browsers you plan to support. Incidentally, using LateX like centering instructions isn't in the spirit of SGML either since their layout instructions, the true SGML way would be to define elements such as <TABLEHEADING>, <CURRENCY> and so forth and then decide in your mapping whether they should be centered or not, you need to be a bit of a SGML pedant though to do this properly :-) >From another mail I noticed that HTML doesn't show images, it shouldn't be very hard to change the mapping to make them links or even to include them inline. Lynx should just ignore them.
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