formatting tools for Docbook

[Chuck Swiger]

Chuck Robey wrote:
[ ... ]
> You know, I don't want to argue about thread hijacking, I only want my 
> question answered, so i will try again.  Has anyone out there used a 
> tool from the ports set, to be able  to do general purpose creation and 
> formatting of XML Docbook documents?

Yes.  It's usually easier to start with the Docbook templates provided by 
FreeBSD for, say, an article, but it's entirely possible to go your own way, 
and write new documents in pure XML rather than SGML, for example.

Or work with 4.x XML Docbook documents published on the Linux side rather than 
SGML from the BSD side.

> Specifically, this is not intended to reference the FDP tools.  It might 
> be possible that the FDP tools supply a 100% 4.5 Docbook XML 
> compatiblity, and if those tools occur in the FreeBSD ports (I think 
> they do) theIN could care about it here, but I don't want o referenc 
> ethe FDP tools at all, otherwise.  I don't have any specific intention 
> to use the FDP toolset.

Well, I've got news for you: the FDP toolset is the toolset one would use for 
working on both XML and SGML Docbook documents.

If you don't want to follow the fine directions in the FDP guidelines, and 
install jade by hand or use something besides tidy to do HTML cleanup, or you 
don't want to install a PDF output tool because you aren't generating PDFs as 
an output format, OK, fine, that's your concern.

> Outside of 100% tested compatiblity that you yourself have used in 
> creating and reading non-FreeBSD documents, I really would appreciate 
> not hearing about the FDP tools.

OK.  Well, the FDP worked with:

http://www.pkix.net/~chuck/doc/sco-vs-ibm.xml

...which is a Docbook 4.1.2 XML document, for example.

-- 
-Chuck