Docbook tools

[Eric Bischoff <ebisch@cybercable.tm.fr>]

Hello everybody,

My name is Eric Bischoff and I recently subscribed to docbook-tools-discuss at
Cygnus. I am participating to the KDE project as documentation coordinator. KDE
is an integrated desktop for Unix systems and has several links with the Linux
project and other free software initiatives. Visit http://www.kde.org for more
information.

We at KDE are in the process of changing our documentation file format from
LinuxDoc-SGML to DocBook-SGML. In order to make it easy for our many translators
and documentation writers to use DocBook tools such as James Clark's Jade, the
OASIS DocBook DTD and Norman Walsh Stylesheet, I was planning to package all
this stuff all together - exactly what you have done at Cygnus.

So it is very likely that such an effort should not be duplicate, and that we
should use Cygnus tools here at KDE, maybe with some extensions and/or
parametrization for the specific needs of the KDE project.

The DocBook team at KDE has also developped some tools that could prove of some
interest for other users, such as a crash course to DocBook that people report
to be of quality. Have a look at
http://www.kde.org/documentation/docbook/index.html .

I had not the time to examine the details of Cygnus packaging, this will be
done in the next days. But a few questions I would love to ask have already
arisen :

- You have packaged nearly exactly the same tools I was planning to, with the
same version numbers. There is one main exception, Norman Walsh's stylesheet. I
may be wrong, but it looks like you have packaged version 0.10, whereas version
1.42 is the current one. Is there a reason for that ?

- Why not putting everything in a single tarball / RPM / SRPM ? There could be
a single ./configure / make / make install sequence.

- It is indeed a very good idea to use RPM packages for those using RedHat-based
systems (I am one, I am using LinuxPPC for Macintosh ;-) ). What is the reason
for putting both the 3.0 version and the 3.1 version of the DocBook DTD in
the RPM archive? It makes the file bigger.

- Have you encountered the same problems we have encountered with non-English
languages and the TeX backend ? We did not manage to make the Babel package
work with French, and we still feel very unsecure about Corean, Chinese (all
encodings), Greek and Russian. We also would love to switch to Unicode encoding
for all non-latin languages. Have you already any experience about that ? 

- I don't know what the hyperref package is and why it may be part of DocBook
tools. Maybe I should try harder to understand that. Any help ?

I hope that all these questions are interesting this discussion list, I
apologize in advance for not having read all the archive of this mailing list,
I was short in time.

Eric

PS I will forward the reply(ies) to the KDE DocBook team : Frederik Fouvry and
David Rugge.
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 __________________________________________________
Eric Bischoff - mailto:ebisch@cybercable.tm.fr