DocBook

[Dan Nguyen]

DocBook, and SGML in general has some nice properties.  Many TeX/LaTeX
supports often use the ability of TeX to separate the content from the
formatting.  Basically when you are writing something, you should
worry about the content rather than how it looks.  My biggest
complaint is a lot of the tags are there to define how the documents
look.  SGML, DocBook being a specific application, makes a distinct
seperation between the two.  The SGML file specifies the information,
while the DSSSL file describes how that information should be
formatted.  Added bonuses of DocBook is the DocBook book from O'Rielly
is available at http://www.docbook.org.

SGMLTools, can convert SGML + DSSSL into basically two formats HTML
and JadeTex.  Plaintext is created by using w3m to convert the HTML.
DVI, PS, PDF, RTF, are generated using Jade from the JadeTex output.

So techincally you can use LaTeX, LaTeX2HTML it, and then use w3m to
get a text file.  Infact here's the line of Python that the w3m (aka
plaintext) backend uses:

self._tracer.system ("w3m -T text/html -dump %s >%s" \
                    % (stdoutfile, destfile))


On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 02:14:16PM -0500, Edward Glowacki wrote:
> OK, so I started looking at DocBook, just to see what it's like.
> From what I've seen, it seems like a really good choice for
> documenting stuff, where you can be concerned more about what you're
> writing than how it's going to look.  You also can put a lot of
> meta-data in your documents and deal with it a bit more easily than
> something like HTML can.  It can also be output into HTML, TeX,
> plaintext, PS, PDF, who knows what, so it seems to fit the bill
> pretty well on that front.  The downside appears to be the complexity
> of running stuff to process your docs.  I think you would definately
> want to have a Makefile or some handy scripts to do your document
> processing, because you have no chance whatsoever of remembering
> all the proper syntax for all the commands involved.  I think it's
> just a matter of figuring things out for the first time though,
> and from then on you can just cookie-cutter or boilerplate your
> way to success.
> 
> So the short answer is: It looks like I need to look at it more... ;)
> 

-- 
     Dan Nguyen     |  It was the best of times, it was the worst
  nguyend7@msu.edu  |  of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was
   dnn@debian.org   |  the age of foolishness.  -Charles Dickens