Re: [seul-edu] Documentation? Was:Summing up our discussion so far

[Les Richardson <richl@mail.tfsd.sk.ca>]

> |  It's been a while since anything has been done with it.  I keep telling
> |  people that DocBook isn't as difficult as they seem to think (I've
> |  written a DocBook document with no trouble using just a text editor),
> |  but no one seems to buy that.

I guess it's time for some simple introductions to the tools and only use
a very restricted set of tags for markup. This should allow the creation
of quite simple but functional documents that validate and allow
conversion to different forms.


> The 13th draft (I didn't want to bother anyone with 2-12) should
> be ready in Jan. I'm doing it in Latex and converting with Latex2html.
> Latex and latex2html are absolutely fantastic for managing large
> documents and converting to HTML, especially for math. You only need
> to use a few tags for the Latex markup and all the links, images,   
> everything happens automatically.

I am also very keen on Latex (my online testbank is based on using Latex
along with MySQL) to generate a variety of documents.

> I was sort of hoping a miracle  would happen and someone would invent
> a conversion tool for Latex to Docbook. Does anybody know of one yet?

Yes, it's the Tex4ht tool. It's well documented in the LaTeX Web Companion
book. I haven't had time to fiddle with this much yet. Also, I'm not
really sure about why, since we can easily produce HTML, PDF, Postscript 
directly from LaTeX.

Both XML and LaTeX are interesting technologies, but I'm not really sure
how much control we can have with XML. Stylesheets will give rendering
control (ie. XSLT), but I'm not really sure that it's as good as what we
can already do with LaTeX. And if one combines the text crunching
capbilities  of Perl with LaTeX, it gives us excellent control over text
and the conversion and rendering thereof.

So...I'm not really sure about the "right answer", but I'm still working
on it. <grin> And probably the "right answer" is...whatever method people
use to create some sort of structured document. We'll see..

Les Richardson