No Subject

[Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow mit edu>]

Subject: Re: DocBook -> Texinfo (via DSSSL) Proof-of-Concept Demo 
In-reply-to: Your message of "23 Jul 1998 19:46:55 PDT."
             <87sojsezj3.fsf@fleming.jimpick.com> 
--------

jim@jimpick.com writes:
> 
> 
> 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.
> 

I unfortunately fell ill after posting the message that started this
thread, so I have been unable to read my mail until now.

I'm impressed that you've been able to get a simple demo going so
fast, even if it is crude. I think we should start a mailing list for
this project, as there appears to be interest from many directions,
including but not limited to people from Gnome, Debian and Cygnus. Can
anyone set this up? I can do it, but I'm not sure how
permanent/reliable an address I can procure.


As for the code, gnomecvs is probably a fine place for it. But maybe
we should think about implementation technology a bit more before
going off too much. I don't know any of {Texinfo,DocBook,DSSSL} very
well myself, but people have mentioned several fairly different
implementation strategies. We should inform ourselves and figure out
which one is the best.

 - Maciej