Re: [OctDev] Re: docbook

[Paul K. <pki...@ja...>]

On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 04:33:50PM +0100, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> * Paul Kienzle <pki...@ja...> [2002-03-20 10:01]:
> 
> > I would prefer to use an open source tool.
> 
> Oh, I thought that TtM was free.  In this case, forget it.

It is free as in beer for linix, but $90 for windows.

> > I'm attaching a short version of Etienne's optimization tutorial,
> > and the resulting html from HeVeA.
> 
> Your post came without attachments.

I'll try again.

> 
> > Make sure you have the following line in .Xresources:
> > 
> >   Netscape*documentFonts.charset*adobe-fontspecific:   iso-8859-1
> > 
> > then run xrdb .Xresources and restart netscape.  This magic lets the
> > browser act on <FONT face=symbol>.  Also be sure that in preferences
> > you allow the browser to use the font specified in the document.
> 
> I much prefer the native MathML support in Mozilla.  The demo pages worked
> for me out of the box, provided that the X fonts server is providing the
> appropriate type1 math fonts.  The HeVeA way looks too hazardous to me.
> Besides, it relies on the <FONT> tag, which is deprecated in HTML 4.01
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/graphics.html#h-15.2.2)
> 
> At any rate, I think that we are talking about the tool to get HTML out of
> the scraps of documentations, and that the format for those scraps is going
> to be LaTeX.  Right?

I don't care too much about format so long as it is stable, convenient, and
flexible.  If the latex to html translators do what we need, and we all are
familiar with latex, then you will need to provide a compelling argument
for us to learn DocBook.  I'm confident that we can find tools to do an
adequate job translating the latex math markup, so either latex or DocBook
is fine with me.

For this release Etienne can post his tutorial in html so that Dirk can
update Debian.  It's not going to happen today since I couldn't stay awake
at the computer last night, but I hope to get it together in the next
couple of days.

For the next release I would like to resolve the documentation question.
One solution is to put html/xml/pdf targets in the package makefiles and
let each package use what it wants (latex or DocBook).  We also need to
decide what browsers to support.  I don't want the bar too high since there
are dinosaurs like me who still use netscape because they can't be bothered
to figure out how to get galeon running.

- Paul