DOCBOOK: Re: docbook for RPGs

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ J B Bell <cipher@eschatek.com> was heard to say:
| 1. Is there any sort of "dialog mode" set of tags?  Game examples
| often have entries where one party is talking to another, and the
| names are set off, followed by a colon and the text of their speech,
| alternating back and forth.  QandA doesn't seem to be the right tag.

No, nothing springs immediately to mind. I might be tempted to hack
something together with computerinput, useroutput, and prompt, but it
would definitely be tag abuse.

You're exploring new territory (cool!), so you may have to invent some
new markup.

| 2. What's the state of conversion tools?  PDF is a publication mode
| very common for online-distributed games anymore.  The very kind
| Norman Walsh mentions that xml2pdf has "shortcomings"--I'm not too
| particular about how this thing is going to look, but I should arm
| myself beforehand.

Getting to HTML is easy. Getting to PDF is harder. If you're
formatting isn't too complex (no big tables, not too stringent
breaking requirements), you might find PassiveTeX or FOP sufficient.
There are also commercial solutions.

| 3. What about free editing stuff?  I have xemacs but it fills me with
| liquid fear.  But I don't relish pumping in all those tags by hand.

There's a good Bene Gesserit (ack! what an atrocious misspelling;
anyway from Dune) saying about fear, but I can't quote it all off the
top of my head.

There are some vi modes for XML, if that suits you better. (I have an
almost religious attachment to Emacs so I'm not a terribly good
judge.)

Check out the DocBook wiki pages: http://docbook.org/wiki/

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Mankind are always happy for
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | having been happy; so that if you
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee | make them happy now, you make them
                                   | happy twenty years hence by the
                                   | memory of it.--Sydney Smith