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From: jfieber@indiana.edu (John Fieber)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: SGML and FreeBSD
Date: 1 Oct 1996 02:30:29 GMT
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington
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To: Charlie Conklin <cc@dolphinet.co.uk>
In article <32503F7F.41C67EA6@dolphinet.co.uk>,
Charlie Conklin <cc@dolphinet.co.uk> writes:
> I noticed that both the FreeBSD FAQ and handbook look like they
> were generated from SGML files.
Yup. For better or worse, its my fault too.
> Are there any SGML authoring tools available for FreeBSD? Or
> maybe an Emacs mode for SGML?
There is an excellent sgml mode for emacs called psgml. The latest
version of Xemacs comes with it built in. It knows how to read a DTD
and can enforce proper document structure. Other than that, no there
are no good SGML authoring tools for FreeBSD that I'm aware of. The
big names in SGML editors (ArborText and SoftQuad) only support the
big names in Unix (HP, Dec, Sun and friends), and, of course,
MS-Windows.
> Does anyone know how the FAQ and handbook SGML files were done?
Tagged by hand. Conversion to various other formats is done using a
validating sgml parser (sgmls) and a program called instant which
provides a fairly flexible mechanism for manipulating SGML document
instances. Plain text and postscript is generated with the aid of
groff. (Note that instant is only in FreeBSD-current; 2.1.5 and
earlier use the far less flexible sgmlsasp.)
> Also, looking through the SGML stuff, I noticed that there
> seems to be an SGML <table> tag mapping to html <TABLE>. This
> seems to imply that maybe you can autogenerate html style
> tables from SGML. Is this true? That would be useful!
The jury is out on tables. The main holdup is poor support in lynx.
This is fairly important since FreeBSD does not ship with a graphical
HTML browser. However, I confess that I have not checked out the
latest version of lynx. Ultimately tables will be supported.
Incidentally, tables do work when the output that passes through
groff.
Currently the handbook and FAQ use the Linuxdoc DTD which is, how
shall I put this nicely, not the greatest thing in the world. The
ultimate plan is to migrate to DocBook, pending completion of some
translation specs for instant to use. I have a good portion of a
DocBook to HTML translation working, including basic handling of
tables, but have not begun the more difficult DocBook to troff
conversion. Finally, a Linuxdoc to DocBook translation needs to be
worked out, but that should be fairly trivial. When I get a chance,
I intend to bring the half-baked conversions into FreeBSD-current in
the hopes that some kind soul will help out.
Further down the road? One day, the old sgmls will probably be
replaced by nsgmls and the conversion will be based on James Clark's
DSSSL engine, currently knows as Jade.
-john
== jfieber@indiana.edu ===========================================
== http://fallout.campusview.indiana.edu/~jfieber ================