DocBook XML -> man/HTML/PDF [was: Makestyle changes]

David Nebauer <[email protected]> writes:

> Man pages are easy once you grok the syntax -- they're written in groff 
> which is a primitive, but powerful, markup language.  You could try 
> man(1) for an overview, man(7) for a brief outline of the syntax, 
> groff(1) for a summary of the macro pre-processors, groff(7) for a 
> language reference and groff_char(1) for special characters.
> 
> I've attached the manpage template I use.  I'm sure emacs handles groff 
> easily.  You can always use 'man -l foo.1' to view the 'foo' manpage -- 
> the '-l' tells man to look locally rather than in the system manpage 
> directories.

I'm not meaning to lurk (still on this list from time when I was
working on refdb-mode.el) and don't mean to stick my nose in where
it don't belong, but I'd like to suggest that you might consider
maintaining the doc source for the utils DocBook XML and
converting to man pages (and HTML and PDF and plain text and
TeXinfo...) from that.

As an example, attached is a tarball containing:

  - refdb.xml, a version of the refdb-ms doc marked up in
    DocBook XML

  - refdb-ms.1, HTML, PDF, text, and TeXinfo output from that
    refdb.xml file

  - the makefile I used to generate the above output

In case the file gets dropped by the mailing list, you can also
grab it from here:

  http://xml-doc.org/docbook/

Seeing as I am the guy who maintains the "manpages" part of the
DocBook Project XSL stylesheets distribution, you can probably
guess that it would make me happy if you all decided to maintain
your source in DocBook.

BTW, the output in the attached file was generated using the CVS
version of the stylesheets. So it is pre-release. But we do have
auto-generated snapshots of the stylesheets -

  http://docbook.sourceforge.net/snapshots/

So you can grab the latest docbook-xsl-snapshot.zip (not
docbook-xsl2-snapshot.zip -- that's different stuff).

Or if it's of use, I could build a Debian package based on the
latest snapshot.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael Smith
http://sideshowbarker.net/