Re: Lame newbie DocBook questions (long-ish)

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc linuxweasel com>]

I'm going to assume that Calum is on the list, but if not, somebody
please let me know so that I can forward this on to him.

On Thu, 2001-08-23 at 05:47, Calum Benson wrote:
> I've never used DocBook before, and have a couple of questions (to which
> the answer is probably "RTFM") that have arisen as I've been trying to
> convert the GNOME Accessibility Guide to DocBook format from HTML.

TFM can be found at http://www.docbook.org/, if you haven't already
found that.  It's much more comprehensive than the GDP handbook.

> First... browsing through the GDP styleguide, it says that the <graphic>
> tag should be used for including screenshots.  But I couldn't find any
> way to provide an alternate textual description of the screenshot this
> way, i.e. something that will be converted to an ALT tag by db2html.  Is
> there one?  This is vital for our documentation to be accessible.

I think that's the GDP Handbook, not the Style Guide...  Either way, we
should be moving away from <graphic>.  Two reasons for this.  First,
<graphic> doesn't provide any way to have an alternative text for the
image (as you noticed).  In DocBook 5, <graphic> will be going away.
The semantics have already changed in DocBook 4, but I'm unclear on how
this affects our documents.  

> Reading the DocBook reference, the only way I could find to do this was
> using <mediaobject>, i.e:
> 
> <mediaobject>
>   <imageobject>
>    <imagedata fileref="images/depend1" format="PNG">
>   </imageobject>
>   <textobject>
>     <phrase>ALT text goes here</phrase>
>   </textobject>
> </mediaobject>
> 
> which works perfectly (when converted to HTML at least), but I don't
> want to do that if it goes against our recommendations or causes
> problems for other formats.  (I also note that <graphic> is disappearing
> from DocBook before long anyway...)

Oh, you already found that...  Well, as I get through with converting
the GDP Handbook to follow the Style Guide better, and convert it to
XML, I'll be trying to write in some new information on where this is
going.

I think you've got satisfactory answers to the other questions, but if
not, write back and let us know.
	Greg