RE: Authorship

[Gregory Leblanc <GLeblanc@cu-portland.edu>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Lawyer [mailto:dave@lafn.org]
> Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2000 12:28 AM
> To: Gregory Leblanc
> Cc: ldp-discuss@lists.linuxdoc.org
> Subject: Re: Authorship
> 
> > On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 2.38PM David Lawyer wrote:
> [snip]
> > > I noticed that LinuxDoc had each paragraph enclosed with start-end
> > > tags which would make it much more difficult to do manually.  With
> > > LinuxDoc you only use a paragraph tag at the start of a section
> > > (or subsection).  
> 
> I was wrong about this.  I looked at a HOWTO which LDP had converted
> from LinuxDoc to DocBook.  It had many more tags than the minimum
> required (but I didn't realize this).  Looking at the template by
> Stein Gjoen shows that paragraphs may be tagged in DocBook similar 
> to LinuxDoc.

ok, leaving end tags off is BAD, I sent a message saying why.  I've read
some of the HOWTOs in LinuxDoc format, and I find the lack of end tags
disturbing.  I also don't think that the ld2db stuff is quite as good as it
could be.

> > >There seems to be a lot more tags (and nested ones) in LinuxDoc.
> 
> On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 08:58:05PM -0700, Gregory Leblanc wrote:
> > 
> > I'm not sure if you've got all the DTD's named correctly 
> here.  I find that
> > the stricter rules for DocBook with regards to "tag 
> minimization" are much
> > better.  I'll post one of my old "vents" about tag 
> minimization (that is,
> > omitting end tags) just after this email.
> 
> You don't really need to since the template shows that DocBook also
> has a lot of tag minimization and is not much more complex than
> LinuxDoc (unless you want it to be).

Yeah, it's only complex if you decide to make it so.  A LOT can be done with
it, but you don't have to do that much.  I think that one of the things that
the LDP is going to need are some people who don't necessarily write any
documents, but take all of the ones that come in, and add some additional
markup.  Again on the tag minimization thing.  If you don't agree, let me
know why.

> > > Another difficulty with LinuxDoc is that the conversion 
> to plain text
> 	I meant:	    DocBook		
> > > doesn't use section numbering like 2.13.  This makes the text doc
> > > difficult to navigate. 
> > 
> > Do you mean DocBook?  I suspect that we can fix these 
> issues without too
> > much trouble.  I think I even have a message from David 
> Mason (Redhat Labs
> > and GNOME doc guy) telling how to fix that.  Maybe it was some other
> > "emulate LinuxDoc output" thing...
> > 
> Great.
> > > For example, from the table of contents it is
> > > more difficult to go to a certain sub-section.  Also the section
> > > headers and subsection headers within the document look 
> the same so
> > > it's more difficult to navigate.  This is another reason 
> in favor of
> > > LinuxDoc.  But since DocBook has more features, it's 
> better in other
> > > ways.  Thus I'm suggesting keeping LinuxDoc for quite a 
> while or until
> > > DocBook (or a subset thereof) is made almost as simple as 
> LinuxDoc.
> > 
> > Hmm, that shouldn't be hard to fix either.  It should be 
> just recursion in
> > the stylesheets that we're using to process documents.  I 
> don't really want
> > to learn DSSSL, but I suppose that I could if nobody else 
> volunteers for
> > that.  I've got a BUSY summer at work, so this could become 
> something of a
> > constraint on time.
> 
> Good.  All of the above makes DocBook look better.  So I'm changing my
> opinion on this to favoring suggesting (but not requiring) people to
> switch to DocBook after the above problems are fixed provided:  For
> the case of existing HOWTOs we need to find a way to convert them to
> DocBook with minimal tags so that they look almost like LinuxDoc.

What do you see as wrong with the DocBook translations that are in place
now?  I happen to think that they need some human who knows DocBook to go
over them once before authors start really trying to use DocBook, but they
seem pretty decent except for all of the formatting based markup.

> Then the authors would be more willing to accept DocBook (provided
> they can easily get and compile the software).

Or if they don't have to?  

> > I think this "machine isn't capable" idea is a silly excuse 
> (no offense
> > intended).  Debian has good DocBook packages, 
> 
> You may be right.  Right now I'm out of disk space due to a 7MB
> HOWTO-HOWTO directory sent me by Gary P.  But when I find space I'll
> see if this old 486 works OK with DocBook.

hehe, got any SCSI controllers in your machine?  I've always got some
several hundred meg drives lying around.
	Greg


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