DocBook -> Texinfo (via DSSSL) Proof-of-Concept Demo

[Jim Pick <jim jimpick com>]

Hi,

Yesterday, Maciej Stachowiak inquired about building a system to
convert from DocBook SGML to GNU Texinfo.  I said that it would be
possible to build a system to do this fairly easily using Jade, DSSSL,
and by converting Norm Walsh's Modular DocBook Stylesheet for HTML to
handle Texinfo output.

To demonstrate how this works (and to prove to myself that it could be
done), I coded a simple DSSSL stylesheet (not based on Norm's stuff)
that can take a simple DocBook file (from Mark Galassi's "Get Going
with DocBook" tutorial), and convert that into a valid Texinfo file.

You can grab the demo from:

  ftp://ftp.jimpick.com/pub/gnome/db2texi/db2texi-0.01.tar.gz

(It's a large file because the archive includes Norm Walsh's stuff)

Read the README file, and try out the demo in "samples/helloworld/".

The stylesheet I coded is very crude, and probably useless beyond the
demo itself.  Part of the problem is that I've never really used
DocBook or Texinfo before this.  And I'm not much of a DSSSL guru
either.  But it does show how the job could possibly be done using
DSSSL stylesheets.

If this is an OK approach, it might make sense to commit this to the
CVS tree, and we can work on it as a team.

Cheers,

 - Jim