On Sun, 2 Feb 2003, Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:
> This is a feature that's been worked upon.
Any information on when it will be ready?
> There are errors in the above, because you are mixing tools that are not
> the same thing.
That's intentionaly, it provokes response :-)
> - Openoffice here is a wordprocessor and a vector drawing program.
> - Docbook is a file format
> - Forrest is a publishing tool
>
> One could use all of them if he wanted: people are working on a
> OO->Docbook filter, and Forrest can quite easily work with DocBook.
OO is not able to handle DocBook and a filter will never be able to do a
perfect job. To write documents with a DocBook DTD one needs an editor
accepting a generic DTD or a specialized DocBook editor.
> Forrest as a publishing system has no rivals in the above comparison.
...
> - simplified docbook (almost there)
Ok, that sounds good, any ETA? Because we're looking at a lot of 'not yet
ready' components already and I'm hestitant to start using tools that
have not been proven yet. This project is challenging without our need to
worry about tools.
> - SVG (automatic rendering to SVG)
And rendering SVG to PDF????
> It has only one issue: no editor.
> Solution: make Forrest accept openoffice files as a source of content.
> Forrest is based on Cocoon, and with Apache Cocoon it's very easy to add
> this kind of functionality.
That would require creating a translation for every OpenOffice tag to an
equivalent tag for the publishing format. I'm not sure this is an efford
we should start, writing this kind of xslt stylesheet is a project itself.
> The problem of the CVS diffs remains though, since diffing binaries file
> is not possible, and diffs of the xml format of OpenOffice sucks badly.
That was to be expected. However, StarOffice includes functions to merge
changes different people made into a master document. A quick search in
the OpenOffice help suggests it is supported as well... (See help index:
Version management)
> Currently Forrest is able to use html files as input, so using a simple
> html editor is another option. The html DTD doesn't suck that much, and
> decent editors make decent html source.
Not decent are:
Word, Frontpage, MacroMedia tools and a lot more.
Just tried the OpenOffice (StarOffice 6 in my case) html mode and it
actually didn't do as badly as I feared it would. The html code was
reasonable clean and might even conform to a DTD. :-)
> Basically, it all boils down to the editor and the format it saves in.
> AbiWord for example saves in docbook, but deosnt' have sections and no
> tables :-(
An editor without tables and sections won't work. Scrap Abiword, at least
for the moment.
> Any further suggestion about editors and formats they save in?
Nope, may-be one of the other participants????????
Regards,
Jac
--
Jac Kersing Technical Consultant The-Box Development
j.k...@th... http://www.the-box.com
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