Tammy Fox wrote:
One of the benefits of
DocBook is that you can use conditionals to create multiple documents
from the same source (like I was saying with the Installation Guides for
multiple arches in a different thread).
Yeah, but not within the docs themselves. With XML the conditionals have to lie in the 'external subset', like a customization layer for the DTD. (Unless I'm really confused about XML...)
So, instead of creating a separate guide with some of the same information, I think we should use conditions in the existing source for the Docs Guide and create this Quick Start Guide instead, if it is determined that we need another one. This will make sure the 2 do not get out of sync, which can happen very quickly.
Mark, since this is your idea, please share some more details about what
you have in mind. How is it different from the existing guide?
It would be a very brief tutorial on how to configure emacs for user-friendly DocBook XML editing. Naturally, I'd recommend that new users make use of my psgmlx[1] package for the psgml setup. [May have to do some tweaking to the package to provide the right stuff in the "Insert DTD" menu. I'll look inot this. Karsten & I are putting the package on Savannah 'real soon now'.]
What problem does it solve?
Setting up emacsp/sgml, effectively, w/o having to do any setup. Truly a quick start to setting up a DocBook authoring environment in emacs. It's different from what's in the Docs guide in that psgmlx does all the setup for you, and provides sgml/xml-mode color themes as well. Put simply, it's aimed at newbie emacs users.
It could be called a "Quick Start Setup Guide for Authoring DocBook docs with GNU Emacs", or something along those lines. The title isn't that important to me so long as it conveys the content of the document.
[1] http://dulug.duke.edu/~mark/psgmlx
However, I would just like to
point out that even if you have used DocBook before, things like tag
usage can be interpreted in different ways, so you still need to read
the guide to make sure you are following the same rules as everyone else
writing Fedora docs.
I agree. Some people do need a sort of 'best practices' or 'our practices' guide to tag usage, even though the online "DocBook, The Definitive Guide" is usually sufficient. For example, the use of 'filename' to tag a package is not at all obvious, as one could also use 'systemitem', or 'application', or many other things. So, yeah, I agree that there needs to be some sort of style guide to resolve ambiguities of these sorts. [FWIW, DocBook V4.4 now has a 'package' element, but is still only in the candidate release phase.]
I honestly don't think it is that long or verbose.
It's long, but given the scope of the document, its length makes sense. I still am of the opinion that <section> should be recommended instead of the <sect1> <sect2>, etc. elements, and that the ID naming convention needs to be overhauled. But, hey, that's just my opinion:)
Cheers, Mark
-- ---------------------------------------------------------- Mark Johnson <mjohnson@xxxxxxxxxx> Red Hat Documentation Group <http://www.redhat.com> Tel: 919.754.4151 Fax: 919.754.3708 GPG fp: DBEA FA3C C46A 70B5 F120 568B 89D5 4F61 C07D E242
