Re: if SGML is so great...

[Taketoshi Sano <kgh12351@nifty.ne.jp>]

Hello. Sorry to be late in discussion.

In article <3911C742.3AA77FD7@mail.nyx.net>,
  at Thu, 04 May 2000 20:53:54 +0200,
 Stein Gjoen <sgjoen@mail.nyx.net> writes:

> > > > > > More importantly, where can I look to find out myself where
> > > > > > the tags are described without wading through masses of
> > > > > > incomprehensible datafiles?

> > > These details should go into a doc for authors, perhaps the
> > > HOWTO-HOWTO. I do not have continuous access to the Internet
> > > to look up these things so an on-disk reference would be
> > > handy. From what I hear from others I am not alone in this
> > > situation.

> > > I have the feeling this is DocBook DTD as opposed to the
> > > LinuxDoc DTD, am I right? If so I'd like a similar reference
> > > guide for the LinuxDoc DTD. Last night I took a long hard look
> > > in the docs for SGMLTools and did not find what I needed there.

> > Yep, that's DocBook.  I think that the only such reference for the
> > LinuxDocDTD is the DTD itself.  If you're using an RPM based distribution,
> > then 'rpm -ql sgmltools' will give you a listing where you can probably find
> > the DTD itself.
> 
> I use LinuxDoc from a DEB package. I used find and grep to locate
> the files but that is not optimum.

Please check files under /usr/doc/sgml-tools/
You will find example.sgml.gz, an example of linuxdoc dtd sgml file,
written by Matt Welsh, 28 March 1994.
And there is the SGML-Tools User's Guide, sgml file is guide.sgml.gz,
and the various converted files are: guide.dvi.gz, guide.lyx.gz, guide.ps.gz,
guide.txt.gz, html/guide*.html

> Also online docs are not anoption when I write and that is the
> situation for many others too. I need useful docs on my disk.

> My large reply crashed here so I'll rewrite it later. In summary
> I feel we need more tags for our specific needs. SGML is
> scalable and extensible, right?

I think that LinuxDoc DTD is a small and easy-to-learn thumbnail
of SGML. It has been used for years, but gradually give the place
to DocBook DTD. LinuxDoc DTD has limited power in SGML area, but
the conversion is faster. DocBook DTD has full power in SGML, so
it can be extended by using the custom stylesheet to add the more
tags.

Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote in his The Debian SGML/XML HOWTO
(http://www.debian.org/~bortz/SGML-HOWTO/) that

  | Customizing the Modular DocBook Stylesheets
  | 
  | If you write a custom element or if you want to change the default rendering of
  | an element or if you simply want to customize the output a bit (such as
  | changing the default font), you'll have to define a custom stylesheet. This
  | does not imply retyping everything. DSSSL allows one stylesheet to "use"
  | another. The stylesheet inherits all of the properties of the stylesheet that
  | it is using, but local definitions take precedence over imported ones. An
  | example of a custom stylesheet is:

(snip)

  | Your style instructions (here the changing of the font to Palatino) have to be
  | written in DSSSL, whose syntax and many semantics come from the programming
  | language Scheme, which is itself a Lisp dialect. You do not need to learn
  | Scheme, the documentation of the Modular Stylesheets (the link will work only
  | if you installed the package "docbook-stylesheets-doc") contains examples for
  | most purposes.
  | 
  | Since there are actually two stylesheets, one for printing and one for HTML,
  | the above custom stylesheet works only for the first one. For the second, here
  | is an exemple:

(snip)

  | In both cases, you'll have to tell Jade to use your stylesheets, here
  | myprint.dsl:
  |         jade -t tex -V tex-backend \ 
  |                 -d myprint.dsl \
  |                 /usr/lib/sgml/declaration/xml.dcl myfile.db
  | 

(snip)

  | Customizing the DocBook DTD
  | 
  |   DocBook is intended to be customizable. There are many ways to do that[3],
  | but be careful: customization may lead to problems when exchanging documents
  | with others. See Customizer's Guide for the DocBook DTD (the link will work
  | only if you installed the package "docbook-doc").
  | 
  | If you add new elements, you'll probably have to create a custom stylesheet as
  | well.

-- 
  Taketoshi Sano: <sano@debian.org>,<sano@debian.or.jp>,<kgh12351@nifty.ne.jp>


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