Re: DocBook and Texinfo

[Mark Galassi <rosalia cygnus com>]

    >> Is there any current system for converting DocBook to GNU
    >> texinfo or GNU info? Or is there anyone currently working on
    >> one?

Tom and Ulrich have already discussed this a bit.  Part of Cygnus's
plan in adopting DocBook is that we will eventually write a DocBook
<-> TeXinfo converter.  TeXinfo is probably the best-structured of the
non-SGML-based documentation approaches (and it is better-structured
than some SGML-based systems, like HTML), so the job should be doable,
though not trivial.

The main task is to formulate the correspondence between tags, and
handle the cases in which strucutre is different.

An interesting way to do this might be a customization layer on top of
DocBook that includes well-written TeXinfo as a proper subset
(handling @deftypefn and other such things).  At that point Jim Pick's 
idea:

    Jim> I don't think it would be too hard to do however.  Especially
    Jim> if you took Norm Walsh's DSSSL stylesheets, and adapted them
    Jim> to spit out Texinfo instead of HTML.

might actually work.  Notice that it does not work naively, since the
DSSSL only allows you to translate from one SGML DTD to another, but
it would work if you had TeXinfo expressed as an SGML language: at
that point the only difference would be the syntax of <tag> versus
@tag.

What Jim is probably thinking of might be a different back-end for
jade, rather than a different transformation stylesheet.