debiandoc-sgml problems (SHORTTAG YES) (LaTeX macros)

[Jens Seidel <tux-master@web.de>]

Hi,

1)

I updated from Woody to Sid and now I'm unable to create Debian
reference (http://qref.sf.net):

$ make
[snip]
nsgmls:reference.en.sgml:52:12:E: the name and vi delimiter can be
omitted from an attribute specification only if SHORTTAG YES is specified
nsgmls:en/preface.sgml:62:13:E: the name and vi delimiter can be omitted
from an attribute specification only if SHORTTAG YES is specified
[snip]

One solution is

$ cat /usr/share/sgml/debiandoc/dtd/sgml/1.0/debiandoc.dcl \
 qref.sgml > tmpXX; mv tmpXX qref.sgml

another is appending
"-d /usr/share/sgml/debiandoc/dtd/sgml/1.0/debiandoc.dcl" to debiandoc2*
in Makefile.

Can anybody explain this behavior?

2)

How can I easily specify a LaTeX macro file which should be included in
*.tex?

This is *very* useful to specify hyphenation rules
("\hyphenation{ei-gen-val-ue prop-er-ty}") and to modify the ps, pdf
output. At the moment it's possible that LaTeX breaks a line
"text [snip]. See dir/." as follows:

"text [snip]. See dir"
"/."

That's ugly! LaTeX (especially TeX) is powerful and it should be possible
to prevent such situation.

One solution is to add
"\InputIfFileExists{qrefMacroFile.sty}{\usepackage{qrefMacroFile}}{}"
in the preamble of *.tex. Another is to redefine an important system
style file, e.g. babel.sty to

\input /path/to/babel.sty % or \include?
% my macros ...

Who knows another implementation (an environment variable, a config file,
...) of this idea? I would use ugly shell commands
(debiandoc2latex + sed (to insert \InputIfFileExists) + [pdf]latex +
[pdf]latex + ...).

PS: The documentation of debiandoc-sgml, ... isn't very useful!

Jens