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Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] too confused to make progress
On Thursday 11 January 2007 02:26, Craig White wrote: > On Wed, 2007-01-10 at 15:58 -0800, Bob Stayton wrote: > > Hi Craig, > > No, this list certainly accepts newbie questions. I'm just not clear > > where to direct you. The DocBook Wiki pages list several tutorials: > > > > http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookTutorials > > > > It seems many of the DocBook tutorials were written for SGML, or SGML and > > XML. You should ignore all the SGML stuff and focus on XML documents and > > tools. Perhaps a tutorial on XML would help? > > ---- > agreed - XML is obviously where I want to go. I have been all over that > Wiki page and stepped through much of them but the interspersion of SGML > has clearly been part of the confusion. Hello Craig, I understand that the whole docbook thang can be confusing. It sounds like you are at least able to write a valid and well-formed Dobook XML document and now want to be able to transform them to other formats like HTML and PDF. I understand that you already have tools installed on Fedora and the natural thing to do is to use them. However, this can often be more confusing than productive, especially when it does not work. There can be a number of reasons for this, but when you are just starting, knowing what is wrong can be hard. My first suggestion is just to let the installed helper scripts be for now and focus on understanding the toolchain. To help you with this , download and install, the Oxygen XML Editor [http://www.oxygenxml.com]. This is not a free editor, but there is a full-featured, time limited trial period. Using Oxygen will give you a GUI from which to work and a build environment where you can create HTML and PDF. While building, you will be able to create various new transformations. However, Oxygen does give you some basic transformation scenarios. The fields provided by Oxygen to define these scenarios will give you a good idea of the inputs required in order to build HTML and PDF. Inspect them, it sometimes helps to see things in GUI. Oxygen will also help you check that your documents are valid and well-formed according the Docbook DTD. It may be that the help scripts installed with Fedora are breaking because of problems in the markup. Anyway, using Oxygen will help make sure that this is not the reason. Dig around the Oxygen install folder. You will find most of the tools you need for docbook and building. Sometimes learning by example is a good idea. I think that once you have a better idea with Oxygen, then documents such as Bobs most excellent book Docbook XSL The Complete Guide [http://www.sagehill.net/docbookxsl/index.html], will start to make more sense as you will be able to visually see what Bob is speaking about. Now, if you get stuck anywhere. Ask here, or if you feel more comfortable I am happy to help directly. -- Sean Wheller Technical Author email: sean@inwords.co.za im: seanwhe@jabber.org skype: seanwhe cel: +27-84-854-9408 web: http://www.inwords.co.za
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