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Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 18:04:08 -0500 (EST)
From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu>
Reply-To: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu>
To: Sylvain Nierveze <sn@penelope.frmug.org>
cc: doc@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: Typographic conventions 
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On Tue, 7 Jan 1997, Sylvain Nierveze wrote:

> > Do people have strong preferences?  Below the main docbook
> > elements of interest.  See
> > http://www.ora.com/homepages/jasper/DocBook/ref.htm for more
> > detailed descirptions.
> 
> I am wondering if it's worth for me to spend time on linuxdoc
> (concerning the translation of the FAQ in french), or if it's
> better to use the DocBook DTD at this time ?

Hmm....  There are a bunch of issues and I am not sure how they
all balance out in the end.

If you work on the translation in linuxdoc, you can basically
start off with the english version and change the text, leaving
the sgml tags more or less intact.  (Score: linuxdoc 1, docbook
0)

However, I can easily supply you with a docbook version of the
handbook with which you could do the same thing. (Score: linuxdoc
1, docbook 1) 

However, the working on the output of my linuxdoc to docbook
converter is probably not the best way to learn docbook.  (Score:
linuxdoc 2, docbook 1)

However, I am working on collecting some good docbook examples,
as well as marking up one of the tutorials
(http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials) as a home-grown example. 
(Score: linuxdoc 2, docbook 2)

Linuxdoc will go away sometime, and although the automatic
conversion yields a syntactically correct docbook instance that
formats approximately the same as the current linuxdoc documents,
a fair amount of manual retagging is going to be necessary to
really take advantage of docbook.  Whether this is easier to do
during or after translation, I have no idea.  (Score: linuxdoc 2,
docbook 2)

Linuxdoc is pretty easy markup, but beyond that it is a pain. 
(Score: linuxdoc 2, docbook 3) 

We currently do not have a docbook to groff (and hence text and
postscript) conversion and the "production" copy of the handbook
is not moving to docbook until that happens.  (Score: linuxdoc 3,
docbook 3)



So, as you can see, this is not a clear cut case!

-john