On Sunday 25 February 2001 20:31, Jethro Cramp wrote:
Docbook is something that I was perusing last week in my search for the ultimate document format (still looking).
I came across the following tools which I haven't had time to take a good look at yet but might be worth further investigation:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xeena
Most of the projects that I found on Sourceforge or Freshmeat when I searched for "Docbook" were in the very early stages of development. If you search for "XML editor" you get a *lot* of hits.
Conglomerate looks like a very interesting project.
Bye,
Jethro
Jethro, If you already know what I'm about to say, please foregive me my assumption that you are at the stage I was in my second week of researching this subject. The way I see things is DocBook is a markup standard for technical documentation. It's not dissimilar to the traditional conventions used by publishers to markup text for the type setter. I don't fully understand how all these things relate, but, as I understand things, there are markup languages such as XML or SGML(the predecessor of XML) and there are display languages such as DSSSL, FOSI, CSS, and XSL. Ideally the markup language should not dictate any specifics of how the contents of a document should be displayed. The markup language should only indicate the category of the element it tags. For example, a <title>here be the title</title> tag tells the processor that the content of the element "here be the title" is to be treated as a title. It dose not indicate whether titles should be bold, underlined, indented or otherwise specially rendered. Such rendering information is the domain of the style sheet language. In order to convert raw document content into a final product on first needs a markup convention (DocBook) expressed in some markup language (XML.) This markup language convention is then applied to the raw text by some means. Currently that means is, more often than not, manual editing or through the use of 'privative' pick lists. Once the raw document is marked up, it can then be submitted to the rendering tool (XT) which processes the marked up material in accordance with instructions encoded in a style sheet using a style sheet language (XSL). Of course the final product of this is likely in xhtml or postscript which must be further processed before it generates the actual images which hit our retina and are then processed by our brains. (I'll forego that detail for now.) The problem I have encountered is that there seems to be not product which nicely takes one the from beginning to the end of this process. Currently we must either accept the style sheets available or create our own using primatives tools which do not connect the author directly to the results of his or her work. XMetal is on of the better products I have encountered in this regard. Unfortunately it only runs on one operating system. Steve