Using the GNOME User's Guide for a hyperlinking project

[sami lempinen nokia com]

Greetings!

I am currently working on a university project on automatic hypertext
construction and a proof-of-concept software prototype. In the process of
developing the software, I have used the rather excellent GNOME User's Guide
as my test material, with fairly encouraging results.

There are a couple of issues that I would like to discuss with you. Firstly,
do you object to me publishing the resulting hypertexted version of the
User's Guide in HTML format? The prototype requires minor changes to the
document source (a few lines of metainformation). At the moment, my
prototype only handles the HTML DTD, and therefore I have been editing the
HTML source of the User's Guide to be able to use the prototype. I
understand that the GPL allows me to distribute the modified version as long
as I provide the source code. In the context of the User's Guide, however,
the source could be interpreted as meaning the original SGML source. At this
stage, however, I would *not* like to start struggling with the DocBook ->
HTML conversion and edit the SGML source directly. Later, this should be
possible, however, provided that the DocBook DTD can be used for holding the
metadata information.

Secondly, I have planned to release the prototype under the GPL. Therefore,
the results are directly usable by the GNOME project (or any other open
source project for that matter). If you are interested in taking the method
into use with GNOME documentation, I would be happy to provide whatever
assistance I can. (Provided that the prototype works ;-)

The prototype is nearing completion -- two more weeks should be sufficient.

If you are interested, I can later provide you with links to automatically
hypertexted samples of the GNOME User's Guide.

Yours,

Sami Lempinen

-- 
sami.lempinen@nokia.com senior system engineer
     speaking for myself, not my employer