Re: [docbook] Simply viewing DB

["Richard Quadling" <rquadling@googlemail.com>]

On 25/02/2008, Markus Hoenicka <markus.hoenicka@mhoenicka.de> wrote:
> rob writes:
>   > 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.
>   >
>
>
> It's probably a bit harsh to judge DocBook by the SGML sources of some
>  document. This is like evaluating your favourite ego-shooter's next
>  release by peeking at the source code. You wouldn't be impressed
>  either!
>
>  DocBook is a markup language which is supposed to be transformed to
>  human-readable formats like PDF or HTML. Self-respecting
>  software projects that write their documentation as DocBook documents
>  always provide them in human-readable format.
>
>  regards,
>  Markus

There is a PHP project called PHD which takes the DocBook files from
the PHP documentation and turns it into HTML (around 7000 files) for
standalone, PHP files for integration into the PHP.net web site or a
single giant HTML file.

This takes around 4 minutes to do on my slow Windows box.

PHD is written in PHP.

We used to use xsltproc. This took about 90 minutes on the same machine.

The new software is very flexible.

One of the main reasons for creating PHD was the ability to render
other docbooks, not just PHP's.

I am just a PHP doc user, so I haven't tried this with other docbooks.

Maybe it can help some of you.

http://cvs.php.net/viewvc.cgi/phd/

There is a PEAR install for it too, (can't remember off the top of my head).

Richard.
-- 
-----
Richard Quadling
Zend Certified Engineer : http://zend.com/zce.php?c=ZEND002498&r=213474731
"Standing on the shoulders of some very clever giants!"