Re: [AD] grabber ._txification

[Elias Pschernig <elias@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 14:35 +0200, Stepan Roh wrote:
> I found some old threads regarding DocBook and A5 DTD which could be of 
> some use:
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=2226616
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=5661251
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=5657738
> 
> They refer to some older threads (especially those with me trying to push 
> DocBook) which I was unable to find (I did not try that hard, really :-) 
> ).
> 

Thanks. So, in short, just what Grzegorz said before - using that XML
would just be a cleaner internal format, nothing more, nothing less.
Switching to DocBook is infeasible because of lack of features (as the
threads above show), so all we can do is use a similiar XML and write a
new makedoc.

My idea actually would be this:
Keep makedoc, but remove all output plugins, and just make it output the
above XML. This means, we can keep the easy hand-editing with ._tx (and
a lot of its commands could be removed), and still get all the
advantages of XML.

The output plugins then would be completely separate, reading in the
XML, and generating output in some format. The big advantage of that,
there is no more undocumented internal format. Those output plugins
would just use a simple XML parser, and process the elements.

In summary, the new makedoc and output generators would be shorter and
contain simpler code than the current solution - and things like the
missing sections in PDF just would work or at least be easy to fix (no
need to e.g. touch the HTML output generator for that, like currently).

-- 
Elias Pschernig