Re: Swarm Guide Alarm Sounds because Alex is gone but may return as volunteer

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "PJ" == Paul Johnson <address@hidden> writes:

PJ> For the most part, I've been
PJ> churning out words and sample code and Alex has handled the (from
PJ> my perspective) difficult,tedious, and mind-boggling task of
PJ> seeing that this all gets strained through the DocBook dtd so that
PJ> it comes out in reasonable looking html and postscript. 

Some background: the DocBook DTD is a SGML markup format for technical
documentation.  There are Scheme stylesheets (programs) that describe
the transformation of this format to PostScript and HTML.  The Swarm
guide that Paul and Alex have started is written in SGML that conforms
to the DocBook DTD format.  Alex has integrated this with the
swarmdocs package (in the sense there is a fair amount of common
code), so really the only thing there is to learn in order to work on
the Swarm guide is the DocBook format itself.  The Swarm CD-ROM has
all the tools needed to build HTML, RTF, or TeX (and thus PostScript)
of the Swarm reference guide on Windows.  With just a few changed
names in the common/scripts/build-swarmdocs the Swarm guide could also
be built.

The DocBook DTD is described in this O'Reilly book:

http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/documentation/reference/html/docbook.html

DocBook is big, but it isn't all that complex.  Basically it's just
a list of tags with general semantics like chapters and sections, 
indices, and some specific technical tag semantics like function names
and argument lists.  The psgml package for Emacs does a decent
job of helping the writer to build correct documents.  See
http://www.xml.com/pub/pt/Authoring for some of the commercial offerings.

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