Re: How do people do this?

[David Merrill <david lupercalia net>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Friday 20 September 2002 00:09, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
> I am wondering how people approach writing their GNOME documents (and
> anything else they do involving Docbook style markup). This is more
> idle curiosity than anything else.
>
> Currently, I am finding it most convenient to write my documents once
> in plain text and then, after correcting that draft, mark it up and
> then do another editing pass to correct any stylistic problems that
> result from the markup. Of course, the editing passes are usually
> multiple passes and even after publishing things I will notice places
> that need correction.

You might really appreciate my wt2db utility. It does a lot of the grunt 
work of writing DocBook, like inserting <para> where there are blank 
lines in a text file. Have you ever looked at it? I originally wrote it 
to convert Wikipedia articles into DocBook, but then realized how much 
easier it would make writing DocBook for anybody, so I packaged and 
released it.

There's an outdated HOWTO on it at the LDP. See the not cleanly rendered 
but readable copy at http://www.lampadas.org/doc/473/index.html.

You can see the WikiText source of the Lampadas Developer's Guide at 
http://www.lampadas.org/docdownloads/740/work/Lampadas.wt -- contrast it 
with the DocBook XML wt2db generated from it, which is available at 
http://www.lampadas.org/docdownloads/740/work/Lampadas.xml.

In my admittedly biased opinion, it is so much easier to write in WikiText 
and convert to DocBook after, that I'll never write in vanilla DocBook 
again.

- -- 
David C. Merrill                         http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david lupercalia net
Lead Developer                                 http://www.tldp.org


And that day dawned when Arrakis lay at the hub of the universe with the
wheel poised to spin.
	-- from "Arrakis Awakening" by the Princess Irulan
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQE9iud/WC4Sq/MWsY0RAu/8AKCX3boBWzxCD5H5BzU8BV8+jLoDBQCeNwDE
AsMxoc8qVmtcjIM7UAclr5M=
=ndg/
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----