Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] db2omf

[Dan M. <da...@ea...>]

On Thu, 8 Mar 2001, David Merrill wrote:

> Has anyone done any work toward creating omf from docbook sgml/xml
> sources? I want to do some testing of LDP packaging for use with
> scrollkeeper. I would like to not have to maintain omf separately from
> our docbook if that is possible.
> 
> I'd be happy to help expand the sk documentation as I go along.
> 
> Any other tips gratefully accepted!

Dave,

Nobody has started work on this yet and this would be a valuable addition
to scrollkeeper.  This is especially true since most documentation is in
DocBook.  There are two problems that come to mind:
1) DocBook does not yet support all of the OMF tags
2) The OMF DTD will be changing somewhat, since it is not in
complete agreement with the OMF specification and because we are
discussing adding a couple new elements or attributes.

However, both of these are very solvable problems, and really need to be
solved.  Norman Walsh has agreed to help get the necessary tags into
DocBook.  And fixing the DTD is a matter of somebody (Gregory Leblanc I
think is the maintainer of the DTD) putting in some time and resolving the
outstanding issues on the ldp-meta mailing list.

If you'd like to get started anyway, realizing that things will be in a
state of flux for a little while, that would be great.  In the short term,
people could run it manually to generate partially completed OMF file
templates and then manually fill in the missing bits.  In the longer term,
we can have scrollkeeper-preinstall run db2omf on DocBook files so that
the OMF files are not created until build time.

BTW: I wasn't sure what you meant by "testing of LDP packaging", but I
have almost finished a new example package which illustrates one of the
simpler ways to set up a package to use scrollkeeper and handle DocBook
properly, and it provides templates and some documentation to make things
easier.  I'm hoping to release it today.

Dan