Hi!
sorry for sending a reply twice... i sent the first mail a bit to
early.. ;-)
Philip Hazel <ph10@???> writes:
> I have spent a lot of time recently investigating what might be done to
> convert the Exim documentation sources (main manual and filter document)
> to some kind of standard text format. The executive summary is that I
> think it is not unreasonable to consider moving to XML DocBook format.
I played round with XML DocBook a few times. My personal impression:
Overkill for documentation[1], stylsheets sometimes do not work or need
a speclial xslt-processor.
[...]
> The document is 6 pages long (in the PDF version). Please send me your
> comments, views, and corrections to anything that I might have got
> wrong.
Ok.. here it comes.
2. What documentation standard should we use?
Since XML docbook is a moving target i am afraid that there has to be
done a lot of superfluous work just to keep up with current versions.
Workaround: Steal a simple dtd and extend it if needed. I have done so
with cocoons documnet dtd. Its easy and easy to extend.
3. Maintaining the master source
Edit the xml-source with a "validating" xml-Editor. I use an sgml-mode
in xemacs.
4. Generating output from Docbook
Cocoon is worth to have a look at.
http://cocoon.apache.org/ Ok, its a
web development framework, but is has everything needed, including
"serializers" to pdf,ps and svg2jpeg, svg2png, svg2tiff etc.
5. What is still outstanding?
figures: what about svg?
Texinfo: If there is a xml-masterfile i do not see why there cant be
stylesheets that do that transformation. I did not have a closer look at
this, but google delivered 940 hits for "xslt stylesheet texinfo".
regards
christoph
Footnotes:
[1] for the needs of exim documentation.
--
Christoph Kliemt
entici GmbH, Goldenbergstr.1
D 50354 Hürth
Phone + 49 (0) 22 33 92 82 44
