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Bill Lawrence [mailto:scribe -at- matrixplus -dot- com] had some pointers
and suggestions for Eric to try, regarding the tools and
workflow for authoring SGML on Linux/UNIX, and then said:
> If you want to go into more detail about setting up the environment to
> make this work, you can email me directly.
Yay!
Once Eric gets going, we'll FINALLY have that set of instructions
he was moaning about, 'cuz Eric will summarize the solution to
the list.......... won't he? No pressure. <g>
Eric, you described exactly what most of us have encountered.
Some people persevere into enlightenment because they have
an urgent/pressing need to. Others have sufficient
curiosity to get past the contradictions and the gaps.
What I find, among the suppliers of tools and apps is that
everybody describes their piece, more or less well, but
many of the pieces are interchangeable, many are outdated
(so, at least some are redundant), many are required in
some workflows but not in others, and so on. But nobody
describes some sample workflows that take you from start to
finish with a single set of tools that would do the entire
job. (It doesn't count that, say, OpenOffice.org's manual
would describe how to implement with DocBook, but then
OpenOffice itself can't fully handle DocBook.)
I made a few false starts with SGML in which I acquired
hugely convoluted sets of tools, each one of which had
(or said it had) various pre-requisites and post-requisites,
few of which would (or could be) lined up in a single
flow from idea to final printout. Since it was just an
exercise in curiosity for me, I never did get very far,
and dropped the effort with nothing to show but a few more
wrinkles and gray hairs.
XML seems more streamlined, so this time I'm actually going
to go through with it.
I wasn't pleased that OpenOffice doesn't fully support DocBook.
Tools proliferation is not necessarily a good thing.
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