[Bioperl-l] DocBook docs, was Re: Downloading the tutorial for offline reading

[Chris Fields]

On Jan 30, 2007, at 3:59 PM, Brian Osborne wrote:

> Chris,
>
> My recommendation would be to not use Docbook, for a couple of  
> reasons. One
> is that very few people can stand writing in Docbook XML, you have  
> to learn
> all the tags and the act of writing itself is slow. You won't get much
> written if people have to use this format. WYSIWYG? Don't know, but  
> it would
> have to be an app that works on the troika of Linux, Win, and Mac
>
> Second problem is the conversion itself, Docbook to PDF, HTML, and  
> text.
> Now, you don't have to convert to all of these formats of course,  
> perhaps
> only PDF. In this case you probably have to do Docbook -> fo ->  
> PDF. I can
> tell you that setting up all the Java applications was a true PITA,  
> all
> praise to CPAN for providing a means of installing multiple  
> packages and
> tracking version dependencies simultaneously. However, if you  
> insist I've
> given you a sense of what I did with the shell script below. Hint:  
> you must
> also hack the XSL files provided by e-novative. The reason I used  
> them is
> because the resulting PDF and HTML is very pretty.
>
> A qualification here: all my knowledge of Docbook is a bit dated, I  
> threw
> all those *jar's out when the Wiki was set up.
>
> There _must_ be a better way, I think it's based on Wiki and  
> something like
> html2pdf.
>
> Brian O.

Wiki or HTML conversion tools are worth looking into; there are a few  
perl-based tools but most convertors are in other languages.  I may  
toy around with this at some point when I have more time, $job and  
all...

chris