On Mon, 24 Jan 2000 17:59:48 -0500, Nathan Kopp wrote:
>
>Ron Parker <ron### [at] povrayorg> wrote...
>>
>> I use Windows and Unix, and I'd like DocBook because you can easily
>transform
>> it into PDF, HTML, RTF, TeX, and lots of other formats.
>
>Ron,
>
>I develop on a Windows computer.  Are there free tools available for me to
>use easily DocBook?  Also, the Smellenbergh brothers work primarily on the
>Mac, so free Mac tools are necessary as well.

I'm still looking for a good SGML editor.  FrameMaker+SGML looks really nice,
but it's horribly expensive.  WordPerfect has an SGML mode, too.  I have WP
at the office, and someday I'll get around to checking out its SGML support.
The best editing solution I've found is psgml-mode for emacs, which is free,
but if you're not used to emacs you might not like it.  There are commercial
XML editors, such as XMetal.  There's also XED, 
http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ht/xed.html which you might find less intimidating 
than psgml-mode.  A Mac version isn't currently available, but is in 
development.  Another browser/editor is jumbo, http://xml-cml.org/jumbo/ which 
is in Java and available for the Mac.  SGML/XML itself is a lot like HTML, so 
you shouldn't have any trouble editing it by hand.  The main difference you'll 
find is that in DocBook, you tag things by function rather than by appearance 
(like HTML was supposed to work.)

The W3C has a bunch of links to XML software, some of which is written in 
Java.  See http://www.w3.org/XML/#software .  Another good list of XML and
SGML tools is at http://209.41.82.30/cover/publicSW.html .

Jade apparently isn't available for the Mac, but it is available in source
form so presumably one could build it for the Mac.  Failing that, there is
YADE, written in Java.  Jade and YADE are DSSSL stylesheet processors, used
to convert DocBook to other formats.  It's possible that only one of you
would need to be able to use them.

>Otherwise, we'll probably end up using HTML as the primary format and
>converting from that to other formats.

If you'll be using hand-edited HTML, you should just make the leap to DocBook,
because it's more powerful and easier to convert to other formats.

-- 
These are my opinions.  I do NOT speak for the POV-Team.
The superpatch: http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/superpatch/
My other stuff: http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/traces.html

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