[DOC-SIG] Library reference manual debate

[Fred L. Drake]

Fredrik Lundh writes:
 > 1. Settle on a DTD.  Can we use DocBook as is?  What extensions
 >    are needed?  (Paul?  Fred?)

  Unless Paul has some specific objections, I think we should at least 
start with the standard docbook DTD.  We can adjust if we find
problems with toolsets or complexity.

 > 3. Hack a customized Tex to SGML converter (anyone has any
 >    code for this?)

  I can work on this, as I've whacked around in the old partparse.py
somewhat.  I'll look for other alternatives before I start whacking on 
it again.

 > 5. write an SGML to XML converter using Grail's SGMLparser
 >    (in the meantime, we can use James Clark's "sx" tool)

  This shouldn't be too onerous.

 > 8. write an XML to PostScript tool based on (6), the printer
 >    formatter from edroff, and PIL's PSDraw (or maybe we could
 >    use html2ps?)

  html2ps.py would probably be a good approach if we want to use
Python-only tools, though I suspect a jade->TeX->dvips conversion
would look better.  There's still a lot of things html2ps doesn't
support, and it's already quite slow.  As much as I think I can
improve it, it's just not there for this kind of thing.  (And I do
have ways to convert serious multi-page HTML documents using html2ps,
with a lot of the frills.  Trust me, it's just not in there to replace 
TeX for formatting these things.)


  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.
fdrake@cnri.reston.va.us
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
1895 Preston White Drive
Reston, VA    20191-5434

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