Re: Downloading Gnome Documentation in docbook form

["John J. Boyer" <director chpi org>]

Telsa,

Thanks for the information in your message below. I'll be checking it out. 
Meanwhile I've been corresponding privately with Malcolm Tredinnick. I 
think I have enough xml for now.

John


On Fri, 28 May 2004, Telsa Gwynne wrote:

> On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 05:36:57AM -0500 or thereabouts, John J. Boyer wrote:
> > This is probably a dumb question, but where can I download the Gnome 
> > documents, such as the gtk/gnome Programmer's Guide, in docbook form? I'm 
> > working on an xml to braille project and need some real documents to chew 
> > on. Are the Gnome documents written originally in docbook or SGML?
> 
> I was really hoping someone else would answer this, because I shall
> get parts wrong. I think the majority of Gnome documentation starts
> life as DocBook in Gnome CVS. DocBook began life as an SGML DTD,
> then became XML. So some of our really old documents are in SGML 
> DocBook (3.0 and 3.1 and so on) and never got converted to XML, but 
> the majority are in XML DocBook. They were either converted, or 
> they started as XML in the first place.
> 
> How much XML do you need? 
> 
> Places I would look for lots of it are the Gnome CVS modules
> gnome-docu, gnome-devel-docs, gnome-user-docs, and the help/C
> directory of any "core" Gnome program, where the user docs for
> that program live. 
> 
> I'm not sure which Gtk/Gnome Programmer's Guide you mean.
> Havoc Pennington wrote Gtk and Gnome Application Development
> some years ago. The contents of the book are in the GGAD
> module in CVL, but although they're all marked up, it doesn't
> look like DocBook to me. 
> 
> Matthias Warkus wrote the official Gnome 2 Developer's Guide
> recently, and it is published by No Starch press, but I have
> no idea whether it is in DocBook, and no idea whether it is
> available in digital form. 
> 
> Or there are the Gtk tutorials at http://www.gtk.org (which
> I can't reach at the moment) and the various documents on 
> http://developer.gnome.org/doc/ . I think that the bulk of
> the latter are generated by scripts in the website module
> of CVS. The scripts use the documents in the rest of CVS,
> which are generally in XML DocBook (see first paragraph).
> 
> There are also the API reference docs. I am not sure how
> these are generated. I think programmers are supposed to 
> comment things in CVS with specially-marked up comments,
> and then something (gtkdoc) goes through and creates the
> documentation from those comments. But I am not very clear
> on that side of things.
> 
> How much DocBook do you need? If CVS is a problem, I think
> lots of people will have lots of CVS checked out. I have quite
> a bit of it myself. I expect I can bundle up a collection of
> whatever Gnome documents in DocBook I have, and send it by
> email or something. 
> 
> Looking around on my machine (Fedora Core 1), I see lots
> of XML which came with various programs, but it's mainly
> user docs. I don't know whether that's what you were looking
> for, or whether you specifically wanted developer docs,
> which are more likely to use particular elements. 
> 
> I hope someone will now correct me and say "you just need
> to go here and it's all there"...
> 
> Telsa
> 
> 
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> 

-- 
John J. Boyer; Executive Director, Chief Software Developer
Computers to Help People, Inc.
http://www.chpi.org
825 East Johnson; Madison, WI 53703