RE: OLS DocBook BOF summary

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc cu-portland edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Telsa Gwynne [mailto:hobbit@aloss.ukuu.org.uk]
> Sent: Monday, July 31, 2000 11:53 AM
> To: gnome-doc-list@gnome.org
> Subject: OLS DocBook BOF summary
> 
> I got a laptop recently and took it to Canada for OLS (Ottawa Linux
> Symposium) with me. By the time we'd got Linux onto it, I'd missed
> Dave and Deb's talk on DocBook, but I did use it to make notes in
> some of the other things. One of them was a DocBook BOF (birds of
> a feather session).
> 
> Lots of things came up that I really didn't understand (as you will
> see if you read it) or which were new to me. Most of it is not 
> particularly GDP-relevant, but in case you want to see what you
> missed, it's at 
> 	http://www.linux.org.uk/~telsa/Trips/Talks/ols-db-bof.html
> 
> It's probably all got the wrong slant on things, and I bet some
> parts are really wrong, but just so you know :)

Since there seem to be a few missing pieces of information here, so I'll try
to see if I can fill some of those in.  From talking to Mark G and Eric B (I
can't spell their last names), the tools are being worked on, and hopefully
will be available on sourceware.cygnus.com 'soon'.
The move to XML is almost a no-brainer.  There are a few other issues, but I
don't understand them very well.  I can post an example of something that
doesn't work in XML if anybody is interested.
HTML to DocBook.  Gary Lawrence Murphy has done some work on the scripts to
do this conversion.  Here's a quote from an email that he sent:

I have cleaned up the original 'holy grail' DSL file posted last
summer on comp.text.sgml (and only recently unearthed), merged in my
own changes, added some other ideas gleaned from various DSSSList
postings, wrapped it all up in a tarball and posted the whole mess to

        http://www.teledyn.com/products/html2db-0.1.tar.gz

There will also be an announcement on Freshmeat within the next day
or so.  The original script did not contain any license information;
I have cited the original script's authorship to cbbrowne and placed
the new script under the GPL.  

Maybe that will be helpful to people needing to do that conversion.
Obviously it's not perfect, but it does at least get you started.  I've done
some conversions from LinuxDoc over to DocBook, and plan out a couple of
hours per document for just reading and fixing things.  
Linux Documentation Project.  We have all of the tools in place to process
DocBook 3.1 SGML using DSSSL stylesheets, and even have a fairly nice
ldp.dsl sheet that we're using to make the docs look better.  We're working
on getting the tools to process SGML DocBook 4.1, but they're not quite
finished yet.  XML is out of the question right now, because we don't have
anybody who knows how to use XML with the DSSSL stylesheets.  We're not
going XSL just yet, because it's been so hard to get the DSSSL tools working
thus far.  Ideally, any new documents submitted to the LDP would be in
DocBook format.  We're still accepting LinuxDoc to support our legacy
authors, but hopefully they'll start getting a clue here soon, and using
DocBook.  (If I sound like I'm tired of the people using LinuxDoc, I am.)

Well, I hope this helps somebody, and I'm more than willing to claim to know
what's going on with the LDP, although we're more informally organized than
any other group that I know of.  Later,
	Greg