Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Summary of experiences

[ed nixon <ed.nixon@lynnparkplace.org>]

Too bad you don't have more time for this.

For example, your article crys out for a matrix/table with ticky-marks 
illustrating the cross relationships between your requirements and the 
(in)capabilities of the tools you've evaluated.

If getting the output is the primary concern, then perhaps you might 
simplify and cut some corners: settle on something that purports to be 
Unicode end-to-end because that seems to be a dominant, must have 
requirement for your application, i.e. XML; XSLT --> HTML, XSLT --> FO, 
FO --> PDF. Forget the RTF; it's not clear why one would want to detour 
into that realm. Then look at a commercial FO package like XEP or Antenna.

[You say FO is changing or evolving. I don't know that this is the case. 
The standard has been settled for a long time now and presents a pretty 
stable target for developers.]

XEP and Antenna House? Yes they are too expensive but they are available 
in demo versions that should have enough capability to satisfy (or not) 
yourself that why you want can be done. If so, find the boodle; if not, 
*then* go to the pub.

There are some pretty good XSLT sheets available for TEI although I 
doubt they are as rich or actively evolving as the DocBook sheets. Do 
you know XSLT?

Ultimately, Fonts and Glyphs to display the work? Well, no matter how 
you get to that cross road, the situation won't likely be any different.

How many people would (or could) read one of these documents, by the way?

Good summary but needs a little cleaning up and fact checking.

Regards.                    ...edN

Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> I've been trying to get an application to write documents in Docbook, and to 
> produce html, tex and rtf from those docbook documents. My sabbatical is 
> over, so I have to leave it at this point, but I've summarized my experiences 
> in:
> 
> http://www.valdyas.org/linguistics/printing_unicode.html