[Pipet Devel] Docbook online

Gary Van Domselaar gvd at redpoll.pharmacy.ualberta.ca
Wed Nov 17 12:22:39 EST 1999


Locians,

Loci's white pages will be written using docbook:  the 'industry
standard' for creating professional documentation. It is especially
well-suited to writing books and documentation for computer software and
hardware. Organizations including GNOME have adopted docbook as the
authoring system for their documentation.  O Reilly has recently
released  'Docbook: The definitive guide'. I bought my copy yesterday
and it is well worth the cdn $53.95 that i paid.   Docbook is
essentially an SGML DTD (although an unofficial XML based version is
available).  It is parsed by jade, Tex, etc to create rtf,html,LaTeX,
postscript, pdf, and so on, all from the same source.  The book itself
was written using docbook, and you can get the SGML source from 
http://www.docbook.org
and render it using docbook!  Those of you who might not have the time
or inclination to install docbook just so you can render the docbook
book will be relieved to find that the kind folks at o reilly have also
posted html-ized versions of the docbook book as well.  It's my
impression that David Lapointe and I will probably make the heaviest use
of docbook to document Loci, but it is important to have Loci's 'subject
expert' developers contribute Loci documentation as well.

BTW, the XML version of Docbook probably won't be industry strength
until version 5.0 (current version is 3.1), so Loci's documentation
currently will be written in SGML.  Fortunately, it is a relatively easy
task to convert docbook SGML to XML, so this is not a big deal.

Happy authoring!


--gary 
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Gary Van Domselaar		gvd at redpoll.pharmacy.ualberta.ca
Faculty of Pharmacy 		Phone: (780) 492-4493
University of Alberta		FAX:   (780) 492-5305
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada       http://redpoll.pharmacy.ualberta.ca/~gvd




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