Re: [Fwd: DOCBOOK-APPS: OpenOffice and DocBook]

[Chris Lyttle <chris wilddev net>]

On Mon, 2003-01-20 at 19:16, John Fleck wrote:
> FYI. Is anyone playing with this?
> John

Yeah, actually I've been using it quite extensively for about 5 month's
now to write the new GnuCash help manual. I've found it very useful and
it mostly works. There are a few caveat's to using it tho;
You have to be very structured about you use of paragraph style's, this
should be normal for most of us who have written docbook before.
There are sometimes annoying problems where the paragraph style doesn't
get saved correctly and you end up with no text in that spot. I spent
quite a bit of time going through and fixing these by fiddling around
until the style looked 'correct' for the xsl stylesheet transform used
by the docbook exporter. This involved saving the OO xml format as 'Flat
XML' so I could read it before the transform.
There is a limited number of docbook tags supported atm. This could
change with more developer support.

Basically what I ended up doing with it was using writer to actually
write my content, add tags through the use of paragraph styles and then
once I'd exported it to docbook going through and cleaning up the
missing bits I needed for it to validate with xmllint. After I'd gotten
the hang of doing this its been pretty easy to add new stuff by diffing
it's export with the docs I have currently in cvs.

Chris

PS I encourage any devel who's interested in this to get involved with
OO writer docbook support, they've done a great job so far.
-- 
RedHat Certified Engineer #807302549405490.
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