Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: [Fwd: [Fwd: First Open Source DocumentationSummit at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention]]

[Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian dot rahtz at computing-services dot oxford dot ac dot uk>]

> That's all I need to know really: If I were to make the jump to XML
> and go with these XML tools, I just want assurance that I can get at
> least the same results that I now get with DSSSL and OpenJade.
but I dont know what you are doing with DSSSL...


> Yes.  What I mean is, jadetex mungs things which change the meaning of
> the text and might look amateurish to someone buying a book.
eh??? what do you refer to? there are some residual problems with things
like "--", for which you need a patched Jade, but what else?

> Now do understand that for our internal purposes, Jadetex does a great
> job, but when I export these docs, I'm getting complaints and this is

which complainst? please note that bad implementation of widows and
orphans in section titles isnt "munging", its just a bug

> document.  Ideally, I'd want to take any arbitrary Linux doc from
> linuxdoc.org and run it through a process that prints as nicely as
> an IBM Redbook.
no, sorry, thats still not a specification. i dont know what ared book
is, and i dont know what designs it can encompass

> Is it fair to say, for our purposes of documenting open source
> software, FOP is already a viable (TeX-free?) alternative to
> OpenJade/jadetex for rendering DocBook to the various formats?

nearly; its not as good as jadetex yet (cant do hyphenation!), but I'd
look again in 3-4 months. 

>     S> I typeset my daughters primary school newsletter using TeX,
>     S> from an XML master file. I translate it to TeX using XSL.  is
>     S> that commercial?
> 
> Primary school parents can get pretty vicious!

luckily the other parents have not a clue how i do it

sebastian