*BSD News Article 45384


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From: tim@maths.tcd.ie (Timothy Murphy)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Documentation project (was Re: Slight flame from Linux user)
Date: 12 Jun 1995 14:15:05 +0100
Organization: Dept. of Maths, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
Lines: 56
Message-ID: <3rhekp$400@hamilton.maths.tcd.ie>
References: <3ql3gd$je2@bell.maths.tcd.ie> <AMOSS.95Jun9141718@picton.cs.huji.ac.il> <3rd8ki$76k@park.uvsc.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hamilton.maths.tcd.ie

Terry Lambert <terry@cs.weber.edu> writes:

>The document sources are in SGML.

>If you want LaTeX output, use that make target.

>If you want HTML output, use that make target.

I assume that the "document sources" you are referring to
are those in the "handbook" directory.
[Would it have made it too easy to have said this ?]

There is no Makefile in this directory,
so it is not clear to me what you mean by "make target".
In fact as far as I can see the appropriate command is

% sgmlfmt -latex handbook

This calls the Perl script "sgmlfmt"
(to be found in .../src/share/usr.bin)
which in turn invokes the programs "sgmls" and "sgmlsasp".
[I may have been mistaken, but this Perl script
seemed to be for an old version of perl.
I found it necessary to replace '@@' throughout by '\@'.]

>The FreeBSD SGML DTD's differences from the LinDoc DTD are calimed
>to be there because the LinDoc DTD is different from that expected
>by SGML using book publishers.  Like O'Reilly.

I don't think this is true.
All the FreeBSD programs seemed exact copies of the Linux ones
(developed to format the Linux HOWTOs),
which can be found in the Linux package linuxdoc-sgml.
The dtd used is actually called "linuxdoc"
(under Linux it is called "linuxdoc.dtd")
which hardly suggests a special FreeBSD product.

[I've no objection to FreeBSD using Linux software, and vice versa.
In fact I'm wholly in favour of it.
But it is a bit rich to take Linux software, and then complain about it.]

In the latest linuxdoc-sgml package there are tools
for translating SGML files into HTML;
these seem to be missing from the FreeBSD version.

I would have thought it would make life simpler
for many people if the latex source were available,
eg as latex.tex.gz .
The document is not so vast that this would fill disks.
[It is 74k, in fact.]

-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland