Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] db2omf

[David M. <da...@lu...>]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2001 at 01:22:06PM -0800, Dan Mueth wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

My immediate goal is to establish docbook guidelines for our authors,
so that their docbook is omf-ready, and to position us to fully
support scrollkeeper. I keep the LDP up to date with what sk is doing,
or at least as up to date as *I* am.

An LDP volunteer is going to work on a db2omf script, and I will send
it to you when it is ready. I asked him to license GPL so you can use
it without license issues.

If scrollkeeper is going to generate omf from db directly, then does
that mean the LDP won't need to generate omf for you? That was the
basis of my thinking, and if that goes away then we don't really need
to do anything extra. But we'll still work on the db2omf script.

-- 
Dr. David C. Merrill                     http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   da...@lu...
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org
                                       Finger me for my public key

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