Re: DocBook (isn't it sgml-tools1.1 ?)

["Thomas G. Lockhart" <lockhart alumni caltech edu>]

> The sgmltools web-page is really confusing.  The fact is that you
> don't need anything from sgmltools to use DocBook.  It seems that
> sgmltools is a set of tools to support their old DTD which nobody
> really wants to use anymore.
> Initially, sgmltools used a lot of scripts and hacks to produce HTML,
> TeX etc from the LinuxDoc SGML DTD.  However, after jade was
> implemented, all these scripts were obsolete.
> What makes it confusing for me is that sgmltools seems to start to use
> DocBook.  Now there are _already_ backends for jade (which is
> unrelated to sgmltools) that produces Postscript, TeX, and HTML-output
> so I don't understand what role sgmltools is supposed to play.  To me
> it seems that sgmltools is a software package that has no use anymore
> except for legacy support for LinuxDoc documents.

afaik you describe sgmltools history very well, and the LinuxDoc DTD is
becoming obsolete. I used sgmltools-0.99.18 when first starting with
sgml and aside from the limitations of LinuxDoc found that it installed
and worked as advertised.

However I spent a _long_ time trying to get individual packages for
jade, jadetex, etc installed and working on my plain RH4.2 machine, and
essentially failed. It wasn't until Mark Galassi at Cygnus put some rpms
together that I was able to get a working installation.

>From what I've seen, the sgmltools bunch is working to integrate those
packages, including providing the Unix support for jade (James Clark
works on NT machines apparently). I think it will be a very useful
effort, and I'm looking forward to moving back to sgmltools at some
point in the future.

                         - Tom