Date: Mon, 2 Sep 1996 21:16:44 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu> To: doc@freebsd.org, core@freebsd.org Subject: Warning: SGML doc changes Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.95.960725090235.2588E-100000@Fieber-John.campusview.indiana.edu>
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For some time, I've been blabbering about changes coming to the
SGML documentation tools. I've got things together to the point
where I'm about ready to bring them in so here is a brief
summary.
instant: A new tool for manipulating SGML document instances.
This is the core of the new doc conversion and useful for
a variety of tasks dealing with SGML documents. The tool
originally came from OSF but is only supported in an
ad-hoc fashion. It carries a BSD compatible license.
This version has been customized and enhanced by myself.
Uncompressed source is about 280k.
sgmlsasp and rast: Instant makes the former useless and rast was
never (as far as I know used), therefore these will be
*removed*. Uncompressed source is about 32K
ISO 8879:1986 entity sets: These provide standard names for
symbols not commonly found on keyboards.
These are used by many DTDs, including Docbook and now
linuxdoc. This adds about 90K
Linuxdoc: This DTD had a numerous ugly hacks put in
place to make up for shortcomings in the conversion tool
(sgmlsasp). A switch to instant allowed me to clean a
bunch of the cruft out. I have also switched from the
homebrew entity sets to the ISO entity sets. This may
cause some small, but trivial to fix problems with old
documents. The element structure is unchanged.
sgmlfmt: This is still the tool for processing the FAQ and
handbook. The interface is completely unchanged, but
thanks to instant, it is a bit simpler and some
longstanding bugs are gone. Ultimately this may become
simple enough that a shell script will do.
Docbook: Ultimately the FAQ, handbook and future documentation
will use this DTD which is well supported and widely used
in the software industry. However, the conversion to
[nt]roff and HTML is not yet ready for prime-time. The
question: should it be brought in now so people can start
tinkering with it, or should it be kept out until a later
date?
Questions and comments welcome.
-john
== jfieber@indiana.edu ===========================================
== http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================
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