Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Converting from DocBook/SGML to DocBook/XML

[Dan York <dyork@e-smith.com>]

Richard,

> What is involved in converting from DocBook/SGML to DocBook/XML? Just 
> the header, or is there more serious work?

I've done a good bit of this and found it relatively trivial.  In fact,
now that I have my user manual with the appropriate markup, I can leave it as
SGML to use the standard processing I've done, and just change the header
so it becomes XML and experiment with using the XML processing tools.
(And I have a Makefile that automates this - "make xml" creates a ".xml"
copy of my SGML file with the appropriate XML header.)

Here's what I have had to do for each file. (NOTE: I have *always* 
typed all my DocBook tags in lowercase, and I have never used minimization
things like "</>" for end tags, so neither of those issues affect me.
If you did use uppercase or minimization tags, you'll have to change
those, too.):

  1. Change the header from:

       <!DOCTYPE BOOK PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V4.1//EN">

     to:

       <?xml version="1.0"?>
       <!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
       "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd">

  2. Go through and verify that all attribute values are quoted. For
     instance, I often did this:

       <tgroup cols=2>

     which needs to be changed to:

       <tgroup cols="2">
     
  3. Make sure that any empty tags have an end tag.  Two that I found
     I used a lot were <colspec> and <imagedata>. So the SGML tag:

       <imagedata fileref="foo.eps" format="EPS">
     
     needs to become:

       <imagedata fileref="foo.eps" format="EPS"/>
    
     Note that some people prefer to actually put in an end tag:

       <imagedata fileref="foo.eps" format="EPS"></imagedata>
     
     I just preferred to use "<tag/>" because it was simpler. (And it
     did not at all affect the SGML processing to have the / in there.)

That was it.  Like others have said, with some search and replace
it's a relatively quick process.

Regards,
Dan


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Dan York, Director of Training        dyork@e-smith.com
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