[Doc-SIG] XML Conversion Update

[hinsen@cnrs-orleans.fr]

> >   I am not at all decided on a DTD to use.  I see three options:
> 
> Im pretty ignorant about this.  I did look into the docbook DTD, and it is
> indeed complex.  However, it also appears that much of it is optional.
> 
> It seems that if a reasonable subset of the docbook features could be used
> and documented for use in Python it would be simpler to use, and save
> reinventing the wheel.

I did use DocBook, and I certainly had lots of problems with it.
However, the real problem is not the complexity (for any given
project, most of DocBook markup is irrelevant), but the lack of decent
documentation. This might change when the O'Reilly book by Norman
Walsh is out.

The second problem I wasted a lot of time with is Jade plus JadeTeX; I
just couldn't get decent paper output with it. And I didn't really
want to learn DSSSL either. In the end I wrote my own special-purpose
converter using PyDOM, which was finished in a day!

So my suggestions are:

- Use DocBook-XML, or perhaps Norman Walsh's simplified DocBook,
  or something intermediate. Maybe some modifications must be
  made, but that is relatively simple.
- Use Python tools for conversion, that's what we are all most
  familiar with.

Konrad.
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Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen@cnrs-orleans.fr
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