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Subject: Re: [docbook] Simply viewing DB
I would suggest submitting the document to one of the online DocBook formatting engines. One is from RenderX: http://www.renderx.com/demos/docbook.html There are others that don't add the watermark to the PDF page, but I can't remember them offhand. Perhaps others on the mailing list could offer suggestions. These engines apply the stock DocBook XSL stylesheets to an uploaded file and return the results. The PDF and RTF formats that you mention contain complete formatting information for rendering the content. An XML file contains no formatting information, so that is why a document viewer is a non-trivial thing. The formatting information has to come from a stylesheet. Many browsers can apply a stylesheet to an XML file to format it. But if your document doesn't reference a stylesheet, then the browser doesn't know where to get one by default. A document can contain a reference to a stylesheet using a processing instruction as follows: <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/html/docbook.xsl"?> If you put this line in your document (assuming it is XML and not SGML) and open it in Internet Explorer 6 or later (or other recent browsers), then IE will download the stylesheet and format it for you (HTML format in this case). The online access to the stylesheet is slow, because the Docbook stylesheets contain many files that must be downloaded and opened, but it will work. Bob Stayton Sagehill Enterprises bobs@sagehill.net ----- Original Message ----- From: "rob" <ralarson@pacific.net> To: <docbook@lists.oasis-open.org> Sent: Monday, February 25, 2008 11:59 AM Subject: [docbook] Simply viewing DB >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 > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: docbook-unsubscribe@lists.oasis-open.org > For additional commands, e-mail: docbook-help@lists.oasis-open.org > > >
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