Re: [docbook] Simply viewing DB

[Lou Springer <lou@louspringer.com>]

First, to avoid the flames, there are many that think "styling XML" is 
evil. So here is how you do it. :-)

You can apply CSS style sheets to the XML and get something pretty 
readible. Oxygen XML comes with some that work pretty well. I'm not sure 
if these are part of the docbook distribution. You can download the eval 
to use those I suppose. My docbook has this, the xml-stylesheet 
processing instruciton being the interesting bit. It looks fine in 
Firefox and Safari.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?oxygen 
RNGSchema="http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/5.0/rng/docbook.rng"; 
type="xml"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" 
href="file:/opt/local/share/oxygen/frameworks/docbook/css/docbook.css"?>
<article xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook"; version="5.0">
    <info>
        <title>Article Template Title</title>
        <author>
            <orgname>Organization Name</orgname>
            <address>
                <city>City</city>
                <street>Street</street>
                <postcode>000000</postcode>
                <country>Country</country>
            </address>
            <email>user@example.com</email>
        </author>
    </info>
    <sect1>
        <title>Section1 Title</title>
        <subtitle>Section1 Subtitle</subtitle>
        <para>Text</para>
    </sect1>
</article>


I notice someone else has CSS style sheets for docbook that may work.
http://www.badgers-in-foil.co.uk/projects/docbook-css/

This site includes instructions for css styling the XML using these 
stylesheets.

Lou
 

rob wrote:
> I came across a piece of free software documentation (and glad to find 
> any documentation at all besides source code!) that from the file 
> extension is SGML and from content of the first line is apparently a 
> DocBook document.  I tended to go cross-eyed, however, when I tried to 
> (human-) read the d___ thing.  Firefox shows a giant, undifferentiated 
> and still partially marked-up blob of text.
>
> Is there a simple way to view even a crudely formatted version of such 
> a document without becoming a docbook weenie, learning new languages, 
> installing 'tool chains' and 'envirionments', etc.?  If it happened to 
> involve using an editor application, I could ignore that bit, as long 
> as it is quick to download [on dialup :-(  ] and SIMPLE to install.
>
> I spent a good portion of last evening fruitlessly skimming over reams 
> of DB FAQs, beginners' guides and tutorials, searching for 'DocBook 
> viewer', etc., and for what it's worth, it seems to me that the DB 
> community is doing a great deal of inward navel-gazing.
>
> This whole thing seems to be a sort of 'meta-document' movement that's 
> in danger of losing perspective about what ought to be the ultimate 
> goal of any documentation project: to inform people.  Has it occurred 
> to anyone that DocBook files might fall into end-users' laps?  Could 
> it be a useful format in its own right?  We don't expect users of 
> other formats to become developers, installing preprocessors for our 
> .rtf or .pdf or whatever files.  We fire up a widely available 
> application, and we JUST VIEW THEM.
>
> Bit of a flame, eh?  Oh well...
>
> -Mrnatural
>
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