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

[Srinath A. <sr...@fa...>]

Well, the more I look at DocBook, the more I get the feeling that we
will not be able to use it without some kind of modifications. The
modifications are minor enough that its trivial to modify the xsl
stylesheets as well, but they are kind of essential. I know that Michael
Wiedman objects to such modifications, but unless someone suggests a
constructive way to get around it, I do not see any option but to do
some modifications.

On Fri, 7 Feb 2003, Benji Fisher wrote:
> > 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 have been using the vim-latex cvs tree to maintain what I've done...
Check out the following module:

TODO/srinath-files/python

just as you would check out anything else.

Make sure your python has the xml.dom and xml.dom.minidom pacakges
installed. Just for good measure install the PyXML package... (I assume
you know you to do these installs. Python makes it really easy).

After doing that run

$ python option.py

from the command line. That should produce some formatted text on
stdout. It processes latex-suite.xml file to produce the output. As of
now, latex-suite.xml is fully legal docbook, but that as I have said,
might need to change soon. For one, we will definitely need to use a
<tag> markup tag to specify vim-help tags (repitition intended). You
could redirect to /tmp/a.txt and ':set ft=help' to get a better idea...
Obviously, this is a work very much in progress... I only work for very
little time each day...

If you have saxon or some other tool, you can
use the standard docbook xsl stylesheet to produce html too from
latex-suite.xml.

I have not even begun thinking of anything other than docbook.

> * 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.

This looks interesting. I'll take a look at it next time I get some
time.

Srinath