Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 12:03:36 +0000 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net> Cc: Sean Kelly <kelly@ad1440.net>, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <jruigrok@via-net-works.nl>, Nik Clayton <nik@FreeBSD.ORG>, jkoshy@FreeBSD.ORG, doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Including images in the documentation Message-ID: <20000512120336.A253@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> In-Reply-To: <20000511165534.A24554@orion.ac.hmc.edu>; from brooks@one-eyed-alien.net on Thu, May 11, 2000 at 04:55:34PM -0700 References: <20000509143555.A1692@kilt.nothing-going-on.org> <200005100942.CAA34333@freefall.freebsd.org> <20000511005914.A85566@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> <20000511103919.I25150@lucifer.bart.nl> <013e01bfbb9e$93afebb0$24d39580@jpl.nasa.gov> <20000511165534.A24554@orion.ac.hmc.edu>
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On Thu, May 11, 2000 at 04:55:34PM -0700, Brooks Davis wrote:
> On Thu, May 11, 2000 at 04:13:52PM -0700, Sean Kelly wrote:
> > Which would depend on a bunch of the XML processing tools, too, since the
> > SVG DTD is an XML application, not SGML. (Which would be fine by me ...
> > I've got plenty of disk space, and plenty of XML tools installed already.
> > :-)
>
> It's a way's off, but we'll almost certaintly convert for SGML to XML
> someday for the simple reason that DocBook is doing that.
Someday, but not any time soon (I think). As long as XML remains as a
subset of SGML we're fine. There are also things you just can't do in
XML that you can do in SGML (I'm thinking of things like
<![ %output.html [
<para>This content will only appear in the HTML version.</para>
]]>
which I don't believe you can do. DocBook 5.0 (the XML one) is still
probably 18 months away, so we've got some time. If nothing else, we
need the toolset to mature. You can use 'sx' to convert from SGML to
XML -- if anyone's got the time and inclination I'd be interested to
find out what's involved in taking the Handbook, converting it to XML,
and then producing PS, PDF, RTF, and HTML from it, using existing XML
tools. How involved is the process, what ports are required, and how
big are they?
> I don't think it would be unreasionale to have a NO_IMAGES make variable
> to allow people do build docs with the images stripped out (and thus
> without the SVG tools).
Agreed. Actually, this is probably a good way to ensure that people
include meaning full <textobject>s in their <mediaobject>s
Basically, a <mediaobject> consists contains one or more <imageobject>s,
and an optional <textobject> (which contains <para>s, and other stuff,
see the DTD for more details). We're going to need meaningful
<textobject>s anyway, for the plain text doc build.
In order to do this we're going to need support from the stylesheets, so
that we can do something like
jade -V noimages ...
to tell the stylesheets to use <textobject> in preference to <imageobject>.
I've already put out an RFE to Norm about this (via the docbook-apps mailing
list).
> I don't think we'll be embeding ASCII art version of raster images in
> the text format of the docs anyway. (The idea of a text copy of the
> handbook with an ASCII picture of Nik doing his Peter Norton impression
> is just a weird image. ;-)
pbm2ascii. . .
Joking aside, the plain text version could start with an ASCII art daemon,
snarfed from the Daemon screensaver. . .
> > As for EPS as the superformat ... well, I like the simplicity of having a
> > single storage format, but it's not always plain text, if I recall
> > correctly. PostScript Level 2 (and up) allows bitmap images in an EPS file
> > to be encoded using a variety of different mechanisms, some of the binary
> > (right?).
>
> Raster and vector data have so little in common that is seems like a
> very bad idea to try to have a single representation. Vector data seems
> to be a good fit for a human editable text system like SVG, but raster
> data just begs for a compressed, packed binary format like PNG.
I agree. Which is unsurprising, as it's basically what I said at the end
of my first message (although I didn't realise that dia used the SVG DTD).
Is there an svg2eps tool we can use.
OK, I know I can look it up myself, but there's only so many hours in the
day. On a similar note, and something that's just occured to me -- I
*think* we're trail-blazing here, in that I don't believe the other free
doc projects (LDP, GnomeDoc, etc) have seriously tackled this yet. BICBW,
so if someone would like to go off and do the leg work to investigate this
and report back, perhaps we can just steal their implementation^W^W^Wleverage
their work in a FreeBSD context. . .
N
--
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