On Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:13:50 -0400, Pavel Sanda <sa...@lyx.org> wrote:
its my impression that some of the problems people have to tackle now
when
using docbook would be in fact just a few lines of code change. the
problem is
that i basically know nothing about the issues around docbook/sgml etc.
but it
may be easy for for people using docbook agree on what is to be changed
wrt the
lyx output?
I actually still owe Jose an email about this--it's been sitting in my
inbox for several months now.
We decided to use Docbook here since it's an industry standard among our
peers, and it seemed a reasonable thing to do to stay current with them
all. I had hoped to spur the adoption of LyX (I've been using it for
awhile), but it turns out that the Docbook support wasn't quite mature
enough to get us there.
In particular, we were looking for Docbook 5.0 support, and I think that
LyX for awhile has been stuck at 4.2. The XML elements for 5.0 are
somewhat different (my knowledge of 4.2 is pretty slim, so I can't say
exactly how they differ--but I had some validation issues when doing
document conversion).
I would think that one priority would be producing XML that complies with
version 5.0. I'm hardly an expert on this, but if I can be of some
reasonable help, I'll do it.
I confess that my vision was essentially having LyX to produce PDFs that
were easier to work with (munging stylesheets and tweaking FO output is
not at all something I'm interested in doing, but I've had to) and XML
that can be more easily transformed into nice HTML--something that's an
absolute must if you're going to publish documentation in multiple forms.
If LyX could provide even a basic (but valid) output to Docbook XML (with
minimal stylistic markup--the normal ones like emphasis, bold, code, et
c.), transforming the HTML wouldn't be such a difficult thing using free
toolchains.
As it stands, we use Oxygen's XML editor for writing our documentation; we
probably won't change any time soon, but it would be fantastic if there
were a reasonable workflow for using LyX.
Best,
Ethan
(emets...@obj-sys.com)
