DocBook XML tools

DocBook XML tools

[Andrey Slepuhin]

Hi everybody,

I was managed to write some program docs (what I really don't like to do :-()
in XML. I got DocBook XML DTD/Norman Walsh's XSL stylesheets/James Clark's
XP/XT toolkit. As a result I built some (very preliminary) RPM packages with
DocBook/XML support. So I have some questions:

1) Is this mailing list a correct place to discuss DocBook/XML problems or
   it is SGML-orieented?
2) Does anybody already have packaged tools for DocBook/XML processing?
3) If 2) == false, does anybody interested in maintaining such packages?
4) It seems that XP/XT are slightly outdated. Does anybody know if Clark
   still supports his tools or I should try other XSLT implementations?

FYI, I built the following RPMs:
xml-tools - XP/XT with catalogs support from ArborText
xml-docbook - DocBook DTD from Oasis, simplified DocBook DTD and XSL
  stylesheets from Norman Walsh and TDG
xml-website - WebSite DTD and stylesheets from Norman Walsh including XBel
xml-slides - Slides DTD and stylesheets from Norman Walsh

What I didn't try yet:
Chunk support using perl (XT-oriented chunking works)
Printing (i.e. converting to FO and passing it to Passive TeX)

If anybody interested I can upload my RPMs to HTTP server.

Best regards,
Andrey.

P.S. I'm not aware about licensing issues of used tools so please tell
me if I did something wrong.

Re: DocBook XML tools

[Andrey Slepuhin]

Hi everybody,

Because some people seem to be interested in XML/DocBook RPMs, I
uploaded
them to

  http://glade.nmd.msu.ru/~pooh/xml-tools

Please note that these packages are not tested well, so use them at your
own risk
(but at least they work for me). I'll be glad to do any improvements/bug
fixes in scripts
and packages structure please send your suggestions. I'm not responsible
for any bugs
in stylesheets (though I saw some).

Due to limited number of supported document charsets in XT, reencoding
on script level
is supported, but it works only for main document and I'm still
searching for a
better solution (no, I don't want to edit files in UTF-8).

Best regards,
Andrey.

P.S. As a test, I converted TDG (first transformed to XML) to HTML. It
took
about 8 minutes on my Linux box (dual PIII-450, 512Mb RAM). XT is slow
but correct.
I know people that tried to do the same thing with some other free XSLT
engines,
but unsuccessfully.