Re: markup language for tutorial
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de writes:
> On Fri, Jul 10, 1998 at 11:34:25AM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > On Fri, 10 Jul 1998 Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de wrote:
> > > If you ask me, I think the RMS is on the wrong path with texinfo.
> > > SGML is the whisper of the future. Maybe you want to ask him if they
> > > dont want to donate a texinfo backend to jade dsssl engine?
> > How much work is involved here? I see the existing DSSSL source for other
> > formats is around 9000 lines according to wc. Is this something likely to
> > happen if there's interest, or a huge pain they'd have to pay someone to
> > do?
Don't confused the "stylesheets" (DSSSL) with the jade backend.
> Well, it is so that the DSSSL standard is huge (several hundred pages)
> and harder to read than the SGML standard. James Clark does wonderful
> things, but he is also very busy. You would need someone who has
> knowledge about C++, SGML and DSSSL. The standard is not set in stone,
> too. Currently, Jade is only evolving very slow.
Yes, too slowly, if you ask me, although I'm please to see someone's
working on a nroff/ascii backend to jade. Once the backend is there,
then doing the style is pretty easy.
> OTOH, if the GNU project is *really* serious about texinfo, support
> for SGML/DSSSL is a *must*, because this is the future.
> I think they would have to pay :) but maybe there are really people
> interested in such a project. Currently, a groff backend is being
> written. Backends for html, rtf and tex (with jadetex) already exist.
> Which this amount of example code, it should probably not be too
> hard.
Don't think that jade is the only SGML process out there.
'sdc' (program and the debian package, maintained by me) will right
here and now produce NROFF (-mandoc), ASCII, info, HTML, LaTeX, Lout,
and PS/PDF (via Lout or LaTeX). It's in contrib because it uses the
non-free bigloo scheme compiler. The other drawback to sdc is that is
does not use DSSSL and it only supports a few DTDs (it's own, which I
liek a lot, linuxdoc, with some problems; debiandoc support would
probably be easy to add).
[Early hint, don't spread it around. A friend of mine is nearly
complete porting sdc to guile, the FSF scheme compiler. Once that's
done (either forking or not) him and I are hoping to work on making
sdc use DSSSL.]
--
.....A. P. Harris...apharris@onShore.com...<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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