Re: debiandoc or docbook

On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 07:25:03PM +0000, Thaddeus H. Black wrote:
> My question is: is it normal and acceptable in your view
> to mark this kind of document up in debiandoc-sgml, or
> would it be better to mark it up in docbook-sgml/xml?

In the past debiandoc-sgml was used for these documents but since this
is a special Debian solution which lacks the acceptance docbook-sgml
has it is planned to use XML in the future.
There exists a tool debiandoc2docbookxml in the debiandoc-sgml
package which helps you converting SGML into XML.

> Actually, in the past I have usually used LaTeX for this
> kind of thing; but people seem to prefer the SGML/XML
> markups for software documentation these days.  If
> people like SGML/XML, then okay, I'll use it.  But,
> docbook or debiandoc?

I used LaTeX a long time too and I'm still a fan of it.
Please note that you want likely proper PS/PDF support for printings
which is currently not supported in docbook-xml for Asian languages
such as Japanese. This is because XSL-FO is used instead of pdflatex
which seems to lack a few features. There are also known issues of
xmltex.

debiandoc-sgml supports also Japanese but no UTF-8. But you may improve
the PS/PDF output by specifying a script which is applied on the
generated .tex file. So you can improve the document using special macros
(which is of course not portable when switching to XML) but it a nice
way to add further support to debiandoc-sgml.

Jens