[Vim-latex-devel] Re: tex-refs project and xml to vim-help conversion

[Benji F. <be...@me...>]

Michael Wiedmann wrote:
> * Peter Karp <pma...@ka...> [030131 14:34]:
> 
>>>I downloaded 0.2.1 of the tex-refs xml source. It looks like you are
>>>using the DocBook DTD.
> 
> We are using DocBook XML V4.2, currently the most actual version.
> 
> The HTML (chunked and non-chunked) transformation process uses the 
> most actual version of the DocBook XSL Stylesheets (V1.60.1 at the
> time of this writing), using Saxon as XSLT processor (I'd prefer to
> use xsltproc from libxml2 because it would be much faster, but it
> is still buggy).
> 
> For TXT output we use the HTML non-chunked output and use 'lynx -dump'
> to create TXT output. Note: there are no XSL stylesheets to generate
> directly TXT output!
> 
> RTF is generated using openjade and the DSSSL stylesheets (there are
> no XSL stylesheets for RTF output available).
> 
> PDF is still experimental, the XSL-FO output is quite good, but the
> backends to transform this into high quality PDF are not yet ready.
> Currently there is some work undergoing in the ConTeXt community,
> which might lead to good PDF in the near future.

      That's too bad.  I was under the impression that LaTeX output was 
already standard.  Especially for the tex-refs and vim-latex projects, 
it would be nice to have some form of TeX output!

> IMHO it's _not_ a good idea to restrict the use to a subset of all available
> DocBook tags! If a backend cannot handle specific tags it should simply 
> copy the contents (all between start and end tag) of the unknown tags 
> unchanged to the output file.
> 
> Maybe you should consider to split the source XML file into separate
> files. It can be easier to handle only a part (e.g. Chapter 1, TeX) 
> of the complete XML file at the beginning. I could provide a XSL
> stylesheets which auomatically extracts a specific section of the
> complete source file into a separate file.
> 
> Please let me know if you need any further information or help
> (as Peter already mentioned I'm quite busy at the moment but will
> do my best to assist you in your work).
> 
> Michael

      Thanks for the information.  It is beginning to sound as if XSLT 
is not the right tool for us to use, after all.  I am inclined to write 
a custom filter from DocBook directly to vim help, rather than use some 
intermediate format.  We might use Python, which already has support for 
processing XML.

      We in the vim-latex project know very little about XML and 
DocBook.  What we really want at this point is a reading list to get 
started.  What is the structure of a DocBook document?  What is the idea 
behind it?  What needs to be done to generate a specific output format? 
  Just point me to some good "getting started" guides, and I think I can 
go from there ... or at least, it will keep me busy for a while. ;)

					--Benji