more defined process

Tammy Fox tfox at redhat.com
Sat Aug 14 22:57:40 UTC 2004


On Sat, 2004-08-14 at 17:39, Mark Johnson wrote:
> Tammy Fox wrote:
> 
> > One of the benefits of
> > DocBook is that you can use conditionals to create multiple documents
> > from the same source (like I was saying with the Installation Guides for
> > multiple arches in a different thread). 
> 
> Yeah, but not within the docs themselves. With XML the conditionals 
> have to lie in the 'external subset', like a customization layer for 
> the DTD. (Unless I'm really confused about XML...)
> 

You can set conditionals within the docs themselves. DocBook XML has
what is called profiling. 

http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/Profiling.html

I managed to figure this out for the Fedora Release Notes, and it works
to have one master file from which all arch-specific release notes are
built. 

There are built-in tag attributes for which you can assign keywords such
as x86 for the arch attribute or linux for the os attribute.

Then, when you build the HTML, you tell it which profiles to include.
You can even include multiple profiles (unlike DocBook SGML conditional
INCLUDE statements). For example:

xsltproc -o index.html --nonet --xinclude \
  -stringparam "profile.arch" "x86" \
  -stringparam "profile.os" "linux" \
  main.xsl example.xml

As long as you use the built-in profile attributes, no customized DTD is
needed.

Tammy

> > So, instead of creating a
> > separate guide with some of the same information, I think we should use
> > conditions in the existing source for the Docs Guide and create this
> > Quick Start Guide instead, if it is determined that we need another one.
> > This will make sure the 2 do not get out of sync, which can happen very
> > quickly.
> > 
> > Mark, since this is your idea, please share some more details about what
> > you have in mind. How is it different from the existing guide? 
> 
> It would be a very brief tutorial on how to configure emacs for 
> user-friendly DocBook XML editing. Naturally, I'd recommend that new 
> users make use of my psgmlx[1] package for the psgml setup. [May 
> have to do some tweaking to the package to provide the right stuff 
> in the "Insert DTD" menu. I'll look inot this. Karsten & I are 
> putting the package on Savannah 'real soon now'.]
> 
> 
> > What problem does it solve?
> 
> Setting up emacsp/sgml, effectively, w/o having to do any setup. 
> Truly a quick start to setting up a DocBook authoring environment in 
> emacs. It's different from what's in the Docs guide in that psgmlx 
> does all the setup for you, and provides sgml/xml-mode color themes 
> as well. Put simply, it's aimed at newbie emacs users.
> 
> It could be called a "Quick Start Setup Guide for Authoring DocBook 
> docs with GNU Emacs", or something along those lines. The title 
> isn't that important to me so long as it conveys the content of the 
> document.
> 
> [1] http://dulug.duke.edu/~mark/psgmlx
> 
> > However, I would just like to
> > point out that even if you have used DocBook before, things like tag
> > usage can be interpreted in different ways, so you still need to read
> > the guide to make sure you are following the same rules as everyone else
> > writing Fedora docs. 
> 
> I agree. Some people do need a sort of 'best practices' or 'our 
> practices' guide to tag usage, even though the online "DocBook, The 
> Definitive Guide" is usually sufficient. For example, the use of 
> 'filename' to tag a package is not at all obvious, as one could also 
> use 'systemitem', or 'application', or many other things. So, yeah, 
> I agree that there needs to be some sort of style guide to resolve 
> ambiguities of these sorts. [FWIW, DocBook V4.4 now has a 'package' 
> element, but is still only in the candidate release phase.]
> 
> > I honestly don't think it is that long or verbose.
> 
> It's long, but given the scope of the document, its length makes 
> sense. I still am of the opinion that <section> should be 
> recommended instead of the <sect1> <sect2>, etc. elements, and that 
> the ID naming convention needs to be overhauled. But, hey, that's 
> just my opinion:)
> 
> Cheers,
> Mark
> 
> -- 
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> Mark Johnson                     <mjohnson at redhat.com>
> Red Hat Documentation Group      <http://www.redhat.com>
> Tel: 919.754.4151                Fax: 919.754.3708
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