Re: sgml authoring
On Fri, 10 Apr 1998, Damon Muller wrote:
> On this topic, sort of...
>
> I'm going to be writing a Masters thesis this year (ie. approx 30k words),
> and I'm planning on doing it in Linux (drag myself kicking and screaming
> into the Emacs documentation...).
>
> The possibilities I am looking as as to format are the ubiquitous LaTeX, or
> the newer contender, SGML. I don't know any of either, so I'm going to have
> to learn something from scratch, but I'm wondering if anyone has any
> recomendations as to which is easier to learn and use. I do know a little
> HTML.
>
> I know that SGML can be converted to LaTex and lots of other stuff, LaTex
> to HTML, RTF all that stuff, so either would prolly be alright.
>
> Any comments? Anyone recomend a good starting point to learn one?
One thing you need to remember is that SGML is *not* a single type of
document. It's a standard for defining content-descriptive markup
languages. Each markup language is described with what is called a
DTD (document type description). HTML is one such markup language,
and so is linux-doc, so is QWERTY, so is docbook, so is TEI (a suite
of them, really), and so are many many others.
When you "author in SGML" you actually must author in an a single SGML
document type. When you author in Latex, you can author in a single
document class--report, article, slide, etc etc. It becomes much more
complex in SGML.
Each type of SGML document will contain different types of content
structures: headers, figures, figure captions, footnotes, etc etc.
These must be defined in the DTD. The advantage to this sort of
markup is that your document does not depend on a single type of
output medium or format. It's "content" is frozen like a prehistoric
bug in amber. It's meaning can now transcend the ages and tell people
a million years from now what you were talking about, even though
their output systems and computing methods don't resemble our own.
So, that makes SGML an *extremely good* way to store your documents.
Your documents have achieved transportability and have transcended the
barrier of platform-dependence.
You still need a way to display your documents. SGML by itself does
not deal with presentation of documents. However, there are several
approaches that seem to work well:
1. FOSSI (File ouput specification: see www.sil.org/sgml/ for more
info. Normally used by govt apps.)
2. DSSSL (Style Sheet Syntax Specification: probably more what
you're looking for. Has various implementations. Check out Jade on
www.jclark.com)
3. Choose a DTD that someone has already designed conversion utilities
for, such as Davenport, HTML, TEI, etc etc. These are all DTDs that
you can use with Emacs or whatever editor you choose.
So, what would I use? It would depend on the type of document. I'd
pick a DTD that had at least all of the structures I needed: figures,
endnotes, tables, etc. Probably Docbook might be a good choice, just
off the top of my head. From there, you could use Jade to produce
TeX. However, conversion LaTeX isn't quite ready yet. Norm Walsh is
working on it, I think, but he already has a lot on his plate. I
don't think he's got it working yet. (Of course, now that I think
about it, he might not be the one working on it...since I just
remembered he's writing a book about the Docbook DTD for OReilly, and
that could be what I'm thinking about--but he could tell you who IS
writing the LaTeX conversion utility. :-> ) Then from Docbook source, you
could produce HTML, RTF, TeX, PS, GROFF, ASCII, and probably even
other output formats for display or presentation. So, that's probably
what I would use, or something similar.
Good luck!
--
David S. Jackson <dsj@dsj.net> <http://www.dsj.net>
"Linux: Choice of a GNU Generation!"
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GTW/GL d- s+:+ a42 C+++ USL++++ P+>+++ L+++ E++ W++ N++@ o--
K- w--- O++@ M V PS+ PE++ Y+>++ PGP++(+++) t+ 5 X+ R-@ tv b++
DI+++ D++ G++ e++ h---- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
Reply to: