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

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

Srinath Avadhanula wrote:
> I will also reply to Benji's mail here...
> 
> He asked whether it will be a good idea to process DocBook XML directly
> from within python. If you remember, I had spent some time mocking up a
> tiny little python script to do this. My experience was that its very
> easy to get started and get some results if you use python. The xml.dom
> and xml.dom.minidom packages are extremeley nice and let you get
> something done without having to know much XML. The problem is that
> after a while, it will become a bit of grunt work supporting each tag.
> Actually, over the last couple of weeks, I have been very slowly hacking
> away at that primitive python code. It has gotten to a pretty
> respectable size now (unfortunately)... It is able to do some good stuff
> now...
> 
> Benji, are you interested in taking a look at it? If you are interested
> in going the python way, its definitely worth a look...

      Yes, please send me what you have.

> I am very surprized to find that there is no docbook-latex converter
> already!!! But it will be a big gain even if we can have just vim-help
> and html...

      There are two approaches I have seen.  I have not actually tried 
either one.

* One, which Peter Karp pointed us to, is tBook: 
http://tbookdtd.sourceforge.net/
This is yet another source format; it can be translated into LaTeX or 
DocBook.  Even if we ultimately decide to use this as our primary source 
format, I think the vim help may as well be generated from DocBook, 
since that will be useful to more people.  Advantages:  they claim fewer 
(but enough) elements than DocBook, lower tag/text ratio, and tag names 
that are similar to LaTeX commands.

* The other approach is to use PassiveTeX: 
http://www.tei-c.org.uk/Software/passivetex/
The idea is to start with DocBook, and then use standard tools to create 
an FO (Format Object) file.  This seems to be another flacor (or DTD) of 
XML.  FO is the opposite of DocBook:  it describes physical markup 
instead of logical markup.  Then PassiveTeX is a set of TeX macros that 
read in the FO file.  I am not really interested in this path, since I 
would rather have something that actually produces a LaTeX file.

					--Benji