Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: writing a condensed form of docbook

[ed nixon <ed dot nixon at lynnparkplace dot org>]

I was interested to see this item come by last week:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-matters24/index.html

Here's a quote from the Abstract:
The document format called reStructuredText has been adopted as one of 
the official source formats for Python documentation, but is also useful 
for other types of documentation. reStructuredText is an interesting 
hybrid of technologies -- in syntax and appearance it is similar to 
other "almost-plaintext" formats, but in semantics and API it is very 
close to XML. David takes a look at this format and shows you how 
existing tools can transform reStructuredText into several XML dialects 
(docutils, DocBook, OpenOffice), along with other useful formats like 
LaTeX, HTML, and PDF.

It might be worth some of your time.

	Regards.            ...edN

Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   while i know there are numerous XML editors to make one's
> life easier, one of my issues is that, in the end, the 
> docbook that is produced is virtually impossible to scan
> (although i'm sure numerous people will tell me that that's
> not the point, you're not *supposed* to be able to scan it,
> just its transformed output.)
>
>   i like to write my documents and manuals in condensed
> form, and it would be nice to quickly to go from that to 
> final docbook.
>
>   to that end, one of my techniques was to find 2-letter
> abbreviations for almost all of the docbook elements i 
> used, and create a corresponding emacs abbreviations
> file.  
>   that made typing easier, but still left me with unreadable
> docbook, so i'm considering writing my stuff in what i'll
> call "pidgin" docbook, and having a post-processor (sed
> or perl) turn it into real docbook.
>
>   as an example, instead of writing
>
>   <itemizedlist>
>    <listitem>
>     <para>
>      blah blah
>     </para>
>    </listitem>
>    <listitem>
>     <para>
>      woof woof
>     </para>
>    </listitem>
>   </itemizedlist>
>
> i would just write
>
> <il>
> <li>
> blah blah
> </li>
> <li>
> woof woof
> </li>
> </il>
>
> or possibly condense it even further, who knows?  it would be nice
> to be able to write my docbook sort of "stream of consciousness",
> throwing out lists and so on, knowing that, when i was done, i could
> just run it all thru my post-processor to get the real thing.
>
>   i'm sure several people here are gagging at this point, but i
> found that using the emacs abbreviations worked pretty well since,
> given the subset of docbook elements i was using frequently, i could
> assign an intuitive and unique 2-letter abbreviation to almost all
> of them, like
>
> il = itemizedlist
> ol = orderedlist
> li = listitem
> em = emphasis
> vn = varname
> fn = filename
> pl = programlisting
> sc = screen
>
> and so on.
>
>   is there anyone who's tried this?  and maybe even wants to 
> share their post-processor or something i can hack to get this?
> it certainly can't be hard -- perl would make short work of this,
> don't you think?  
>   comments?
>
> rday