Re: your mail

[Nik Clayton <nik@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Jun 10, 1999 at 07:33:26AM -0400, Norman Walsh wrote:
> | From our point of view, the killer missing feature from our current
> | toolbox is a way to go from DocBook to *roff.  A colleague, Chuck 
> 
> The RefEntry markup was consciously designed to allow this. 

Yep.

> I know there are at least two or three DocBook to *roff converters for
> manual pages.

<nods>  I know about them, and looked at them.

The dilemma I face is this -- I really, really want to avoid having to 
document and support a plethora of tools, stylesheets, and stylesheet
languages.  Every new hurdle that gets thrown up is one more barrier to
volunteers actually contributing documentation.

If I can get a system that uses one suite of apps to produce the formatted
output from a single source I'll be a happy man.  Jade is almost there,
except it doesn't do *roff, and I need it for manual pages.  Lynx's
formatting engine isn't good enough for "DocBook -> HTML -> plain text"
to suffice, and it's also too slow (although the equivalent of catman
directories would help this a bit).

As soon as I start installing more formatters I'm moving further away 
from the goal instead of towards it.  This is why I'm trying to avoid 
using tools like "instant".

N
-- 
 [intentional self-reference] can be easily accommodated using a blessed,
 non-self-referential dummy head-node whose own object destructor severs
 the links.
    -- Tom Christiansen in <375143b5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


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