Re: DocBook and Context?

[Matthew Baker <Matthew.Baker@gmd.de>]

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