Re: DOCBOOK: Announce: Simple DocBook/Slides/XSL Stylesheets

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ Paul E Johnson <pauljohn@ukans.edu> was heard to say:
| of a Slides doctype. How exciting.  This means I could have different
| kinds of output from a single document, right?  So it could be
| substituted for the ordeal known as PowerPoint?

Yep. I have XSL stylesheets for my Slides doctype that produce HTML
(and that's how I give my presentations). I'm planning to look into
producing an SVG[1] stylsheet, too. And I have an old DSSSL stylesheet
that produces print output. When FO processors are a little more
mature, I'll convert to that for print.

| If so, I hasten to admit I'm not good enough at DocBook to create my own
| slide document on my own, probably, but I expect I could adapt an
| example to my purposes if somebody would send me one.  I just need a
| working file that has slides in either format (I have processed SGML,
| and could learn XML), I would be very grateful.

If you look in the slides distribution[2], you'll find some examples.
Note that the slides doctype uses DocBook "information pool" markup,
but has a different hierarchy.

It would be possible to write a stylesheet that produced slides from a
standard DocBook "book" or "article", but it would require a bunch of
tag abuse.

| PS: When I go to the URL in Norm W's address, I get the "document not
| found" error from that server. Do you see it too?

Do you mean http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/? Someone has botched
the server again. I've started shouting. It should come back soon.

| I wonder if the "Simplified DocBook DTD" is a thing that gets installed
| in Linux instead of or in addition to the regular DocBook DTD I already
| have.

I don't know if anyone's built RPMs for it or not, but installing DTDs
is pretty easy. Just unpack the distribution somewhere reasonable and
(optionally) point your catalogs at it.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

[1] http://www.sun.com/xml/developers/svg-slidetoolkit
[2] http://nwalsh.com/slides/
-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | Simplicity is always a
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | virtue.--Edward Abbey
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |