Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: DocBook with AbiWord?

[Rafael 'Dido' Sevilla <sevillar@team.ph.inter.net>]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 01:51:48AM -0500, Michael D. Crawford wrote:
> I just downloaded AbiWord 0.9.6, and would like to give this a try for
> writing my articles.  But it's not apparent how I could get full use of
> docbook from AbiWord.  I asked about this on the
> abiword-dev@abisource.com mailing list, but I thought I'd ask here too,
> if anyone has any tips on using AbiWord to make docbook documents.
> 

Well, short version is you can't, not really because...

> AbiWord is an open source WYSIWYG word processor.

That's the point.  Any WYSIWYG processor will by necessity wind up using
docbook as a formatting language, which is most definitely NOT what
docbook was designed to be. Maybe a more meaningful conversion for the
boys developing AbiWord to be making is an AbiWord to XSL-FO conversion,
or even perhaps an SVG conversion.  Both of those XML dialects were
meant to encapsulate formatting information.

To attempt to edit DocBook in WYSIWYG is totally missing the point of
it.  Have a look at the names of the elements in the DocBook DTD.
Hardly any of those names give you a clue as to how such elements are to
be formatted; that's up to the stylesheet designer whether he or she
wants the stylesheet to format a <emphasis/> tag to produce bold or
italic text, or whether to typeset <function/> tagged text to a
typewriter font or some other form.  Of course, Norman Walsh has come up
with some default conversions for thse, but ultimately, what the DTD
does for the writer is encapsulate semantic information about what the
document says, which only indirectly influences how the document
eventually gets to be formatted...

-- 
Rafael R. Sevilla <sevillar@team.ph.inter.net>   +63(2)   8177746 ext. 8311
Programmer, Inter.Net Philippines                +63(917) 4458925
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