FW: [OSGeo-Edu] Subversion strategy questions

[Ned Horning]

Landon Blake wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Landon Blake 
> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 9:22 AM
> To: 'Frank Warmerdam'
> Subject: RE: [OSGeo-Edu] Subversion strategy questions
>
> Frank Wammerdam wrote:
>
> "On the whole DocBook issue - we tried using DocBook for a while for
> MapServer docs and ended up abandoning it because installing and getting
> to understand DocBook tools was too hard for many potential
> contributors."
>
> I also identified this as the major challenge when I looked at Docbook.
> I was all full of steam for the format until I started reading about
> what was necessary to convert the format in to PDF. It didn't look like
> a process for the faint of heart.
>   
Processing DocBook files can be packaged in such a way to make it pretty 
straight forward. The difficult part is getting that process set up and 
there are a few of us who can help with that. Eventually we'll be able 
to set up a process so you feed it the DocBook XML and it spits out 
HTML, PDF, and whatever else we want. In other words we're working on 
turning it into a one-click process and it should be user friendly.
> I wonder how one would control things like margin width and font style
> when generating PDF documentation from Docbook. Is anyone familiar with
> how this works in the conversion process?
This is done by modifying the stylesheets and css. If you want to learn 
how to do it my suggestion is to read DocBook XSL - The Complete Guide 
by Bob Stayton. There is also a good mailing list to help with 
questions. Just keep in mind that it isn't necessary for authors to 
learn the processing details. Authors would only need to get used to 
using a structured writing style (using OpenOffice, XMLMind or whatever 
else) and that shouldn't be a problem.