Re: DocBook questions

[Dan Mueth <dan eazel com>]

On Fri, 9 Mar 2001, Rick Kwan wrote:

> Hello folks,
> 
> I've done work with a subset of DocBook for other organizations.
> People wiser than me tell me almost no one uses full DocBook.
> On that note, I'm wondering...
> 
> Is anyone using, or planning to use, marked sections (i.e.,
> conditional text) in their books.

The GDP is using marked sections primarily to protect sections with
certain markup which is hard to otherwise include or to include external
XML files, using the CDATA keyword.  

I don't think we are using it for conditional text anywhere right now.  I
suspect in the future we may decide to start using this though.  For
example, this would be a nice way to control the document content
depending on a user level setting or other variables the help browser may
know about.

> Another issue:  Can the DocBook tools today support Asian text?
> Presumably, translations of books will still conform to DocBook?

DocBook itself does not limit localization.  I'm not sure what SGML is
supposed to support, but I believe XML in general (which is basically what
we are using) should support at least UTF8 and UTF16.  You will, of
course, need a browser which will support the fonts and encoding.

Nautilus has worked fine for rendering every localized DocBook/SGML
document I've given it, including a handful of European languages and
Japanese. Note that for Japanese you need to manually set the character
set to Japanese (EUC-JP).  Here are a couple screenshots:

http://bliss.uchicago.edu/gnome/nautilus/screenshots/nautilus_ja_022301_1.jpg
http://bliss.uchicago.edu/gnome/nautilus/screenshots/nautilus_030401_es.jpg

I haven't looked into which other Asian languages are currently supported.

Dan