DocBook and Context?

DocBook and Context?

[Piotr Kopszak]

Dzien Dobry,

I only discovered Context about a week ago and am pretty amazed
especially by the interactive part of it. I prepare museum catalogues on
CD-ROMs and started to contemplate the idea of making the next one with
the use of Context.  The problem is I have to feed it with DocBook
(modified) text. Has anyone got any experiences with formatting DocBook
with Context?

Best wishes

Piotr Kopszak
Polish Art Gallery
National Museum in Warsaw

Re: DocBook and Context?

[Hans Hagen]

Piotr Kopszak wrote:

> (modified) text. Has anyone got any experiences with formatting DocBook
> with Context?

You mean sgml input? 

Hans

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
      tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.nl
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Re: DocBook and Context?

[Hans Hagen]

Piotr Kopszak wrote:

> > You mean sgml input?
> 
> Yes, exactly. At least, the biggest part of it would be sgml.

One way to go is converting sgml into something tex, as Taco already
mentioned. I've got some experimental stuff running here, but currently
lack the time to make a decent module of it. I'll send you a perl script
that I use for converting. If the output is reasonable, you have a
starting point. The module (which I need to have finished before eurotex
anyway) deals with those macros. It's a matter of mapping. 

Hans

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
      tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: DocBook and Context?

[Matthew Baker]

On Wed, 30 Jun 1999, Hans Hagen wrote:

> Piotr Kopszak wrote:
> 
> > > You mean sgml input?
> > 
> > Yes, exactly. At least, the biggest part of it would be sgml.
> 
> One way to go is converting sgml into something tex, as Taco already
> mentioned. I've got some experimental stuff running here, but currently
> lack the time to make a decent module of it. I'll send you a perl script
> that I use for converting. If the output is reasonable, you have a
> starting point. The module (which I need to have finished before eurotex
> anyway) deals with those macros. It's a matter of mapping. 

I'd have thought it would be more than just mapping because SGML structure
is so different from TeX.

There's also the possibility of using DSSSL and parsing it and the SGML
with Jade or something similar.  Jade already has a TeX module but the TeX
it outputs is JadeTeX, a TeX format especially for this purpose.  It
basically shifts the responsibility of restructuring things to TeX, rather
than Jade.

Actually, I looked into all this before discovering ConTeXt.  My
conclusion was that for anything reasonably complex, the TeX version
invariably comes out not looking very good because by design SGML doesn't
let you do low-level formatting.  You would have to write a very good
DSSSL for it to look good.  Plus the JadeTeX macros are pretty low-level
so I found myself having to rewrite from scratch in DSSSL things that
LaTeX (and also ConTeXt) already have, like itemize environments and
stuff.  Figures alongside text and also tables make things hard too
because the SGML and HTML way of doing these things is structured a lot
differently from the TeX way.  My ultimate decision was that these complex
documents look better online as PDF than HTML anyway so I gave up on SGML.

Still, I think there are some good things that can be gained with SGML
support.  For example, kOffice plans to store everything as SGML.
Database companies like Oracle are planning to use SGML.  SGML support in
ConTeXt would mean being able to use ConTeXt to typeset database output,
spreadsheet output, word processor output, etc.  That would be nice :)
Plus, with SGML support automatically comes HTML support.  Then we could
typeset HTML pages!

And, of course, there's DocBook.

Where did all that come from.  I must have too little to do today...

- Matthew

--
Dr. Matthew Baker           matthew.baker@gmd.de
GMD - FIT.MMK               http://fit.gmd.de/hci/pages/matthew.baker.html

Re: DocBook and Context?

[Hans Hagen]

Matthew Baker wrote:

> I'd have thought it would be more than just mapping because SGML structure
> is so different from TeX.
> 
> There's also the possibility of using DSSSL and parsing it and the SGML
> with Jade or something similar.  Jade already has a TeX module but the TeX
> it outputs is JadeTeX, a TeX format especially for this purpose.  It
> basically shifts the responsibility of restructuring things to TeX, rather
> than Jade.

I've looked into that and rejected it for the moment. Actually the
manipulation part of jade is ok, but the typesetting part is
disappointing (and sort of useless). 

> Actually, I looked into all this before discovering ConTeXt.  My
> conclusion was that for anything reasonably complex, the TeX version
> invariably comes out not looking very good because by design SGML doesn't
> let you do low-level formatting.  You would have to write a very good

Indeed. A strange mix between structure and typesetting, with
typesetting going back to teletype times. 

> Still, I think there are some good things that can be gained with SGML
> support.  For example, kOffice plans to store everything as SGML.
> Database companies like Oracle are planning to use SGML.  SGML support in
> ConTeXt would mean being able to use ConTeXt to typeset database output,
> spreadsheet output, word processor output, etc.  That would be nice :)
> Plus, with SGML support automatically comes HTML support.  Then we could
> typeset HTML pages!

Sure. Actually I have a manipulation framework already. Did you pick up
the maps bibliography from our site? The source is coded in xml and the
records are manipulated by context. The manipulation stuff is still
undocumented. 

The nice thing is that context has quite some manipulative things built
in (many unknown to probably many reading this). So, in principle I just
have to build an interface. Because we currently are not involved in
SGML projects (that is, not in processing them ourselves) the motivation
for finishing the module is a bit low -)  

Concerning database output: we've done that often, even dbase ascii
output directly interpretated by tex (some 30K records nicely formatted
and crosslinked, an old project, pdf version 1.1 stuff with hundreds of
thousands of links, just another of our demo projects). 

Hans

-----------------------------------------------------------------
                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
              Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands
      tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.nl
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Re: DocBook and Context?

[Taco Hoekwater]

>>>>> "Piotr" == Piotr Kopszak <kopszak@mnw.art.pl> writes:

    Piotr> Dzien Dobry, I only discovered Context about a week ago and
    Piotr> am pretty amazed especially by the interactive part of
    Piotr> it. I prepare museum catalogues on CD-ROMs and started to
    Piotr> contemplate the idea of making the next one with the use of
    Piotr> Context.  The problem is I have to feed it with DocBook
    Piotr> (modified) text. Has anyone got any experiences with
    Piotr> formatting DocBook with Context?

Not that I know of. But if you can fixup the SGML into something any
TeX understands, you are surely halfway done. 

Taco