Re: Simulation Analysis in the User's guide - review needed

[Louis Luangkesorn <lluang yahoo com>]

I've made a number of changes to the simulation chapter of the gnumeric documentation so that it passes xmllint cleanly.  But as Adrian alluded, I used the 4.5 version of docbook DTD to do it.

1.  Docbook 4.5 introduces the mathphrase tag.  This is useful because proper simulation design requires that the number of iterations is computed, so the documentation has equations that are used to calculate the iterations.
2.  The chapter uses Greek letters, so that it conforms to practice in the simulation community.  Right now the chapter is written using character entities from the iso-grk1 entity set.  But the current gnumeric.xml does not include an entity declaration such as
        <!ENTITY % iso-grk1 PUBLIC "ISO 8879:1986//ENTITIES Greek Letters//EN//XML"
                    "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xmlcharent/0.3/iso-grk1.ent">
       %iso-grk1;

inside the <!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC tag. 

So, 2 questions:
    1.  Is there a possibility of having the docbook version for the Gnumeric documentation changed to 4.5?
    2.  Is there a character entity set that includes greek letters that can be used?

Louis

 

"Do one thing every day that scares you." – Eleanor Roosevelt

----- Original Message ----
From: Adrian Custer <acuster gmail com>
To: Louis Luangkesorn <lluang yahoo com>
Cc: Gnumeric Gnome <gnumeric-list gnome org>
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2008 11:26:00 AM
Subject: Re: Simulation Analysis in the User's guide - review needed

Hey,

Again, thanks for all your work.


The powers that be will have to think about your example spreadsheet.
I'm not sure how we could handle that: download from the web or
elsewhere.


I just downloaded your xml and ran it through xmllint which generates
lots of errors. It doesn't seem to follow the 4.3 dtd of docbook.
        No declaration for element mathphrase
        Element equation content does not follow the DTD
        Element listitem content does not follow the DTD
        Element inlineequation content does not follow the DTD
Those seem to be the bulk of the errors. Do you need a more recent
version of the docbook dtd for your chapter? If so, we will need to
check with gnome-docs what version they allow us to use these days. I
need the doc to pass xmllint cleanly to keep the manual manageable given
its size so we need to clean up your code even if we need to sacrifice
readability/elegance. I use:
        xmllint \
          --valid /usr/share/xml/docbook/schema/dtd/4.3/docbookx.dtd \
          --noout gnumeric.xml
which happens to be where the 4.3 dtd is on my machine.

Also, if you can set your tab space to 2, your document would conform to
the rest of the manual. XML becomes unmanageable with bigger indents. It
seems that you have not indented some of the lists but I haven't looked
at that in detail yet.

That's all at first glance. I hope I have commit access again to the svn
now so I can bring in your doc when I get it to validate.

cheers,

--adrian