Anaconda documents

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, 2003-11-20 at 15:14, Alexander Rau (work) wrote:
> Took my lunch break to look into the creation of fedora-docs. And I have to
> agree with Taylor:
> 
> "Taking a look at the Documentation project site, I see that I need
> Docbook XML, stylesheets, Emacs PSGML (or NXML), etc.  What is the
> learning curve for these?  I have never done XML, and I am not an Emacs
> user (sorry to start a flamewar).  Perhaps I could write the text and
> someone with more knowledge of XML/Emacs could put it into the right
> format.  I am not unwilling to learn XML/Emacs, but my time might be
> spent better elsewhere."
> 
> This is very discouraging!!

Alexander,

Don't get discouraged; it's not nearly as hard as it seems... and
believe me, my first reaction was *exactly* the same. I am more than
happy to help move stuff to XML, but I would encourage you to give this
a try. All you need to do is:

1. Make sure you have the "Authoring and Publishing" component (from
redhat-config-packages), Emacs (in the "Editors" component), and the
psgml package installed.

2. Follow the Documentation Guide to set up your ~/.emacs,
parse/save/load the DTD, etc. I found it easiest to simply make a copy
of the example-tutorial/ folder and then strip out the content and start
from there.

There's not that many keystrokes you need to learn to use Emacs
effectively in this way, but I will be the first to admit I still find
it cumbersome. I tend to use... er, that other editor. :-) In any case,
if I was better at this sort of thing I would try and make this work in
LyX, which is so much easier to use it's ridiculous. As Karsten (I
think) mentioned, the hard part is getting your tool of choice to write
everything to file the same way as everyone else, so that when we move
to a community repository, no one is stepping on others' toes.

To reiterate though, I will be happy to edit XML if you decide this is
too painful. :-)
-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE