[PYTHON DOC-SIG] SGML-Tools

[Graham C. Hughes]

--28PehD5rHphoINzP

On Feb 10, Fred L. Drake wrote
>   Their document type definition is based on an old DTD called
> "QWERTZ" which was intended to be almost a direct translation of
> LaTeX.  Other than allowing documents to be validated against a DTD
> and being able to use their software, there don't appear to be any
> particular advantages to linuxdox/sgml-tools.

Do you mean `advantages to SGML-Tools' or `advantages to SGML'?  SGML
has a lot to recommend it for this sort of idea, starting with the fact
that it's much easier to translate into strange output formats than any
other tool.  Witness the perpetual difficulty turning the LaTeXed Python
manuals into Texinfo for an example.

SGML-Tools has the benefit that a large number of translators (to LyX,
RTF (and thence to Windows Help), HTML, LaTeX, even straight text) are
already written, and that somebody else is doing the maintenance so we
don't have to.  Plus, people like me can use it and not have to hack
around with DTDs to get output to work.

<on distribution, Guido says...>
> > On the other hand, the list of software that is *required* to make it
> > work is rather impressive, and I wonder how easy it would be to do

One option is to distribute the SGML files, and either write a Python
SGML parser (not a lot of fun...) or simply have the full documentation
in various formats up on ftp.python.org.  We could even be magnanimous
and distribute the HTML output with the distribution.
-- 
Graham Hughes (graham.hughes@resnet.ucsb.edu)
http://A-abe.resnet.ucsb.edu/~graham/ -- MIME & PGP mail OK.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by 
	stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor

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