Mailing List Archive

In article <Pine.SOL.3.95.970819174724.4293A-100000@orb.mincom.oz.au> you wrote:

> I've finally had a chance to debug SDF's SGML output driver,
> so the latest version of SDF should now be ready for
> evaluation/use on the Apache Documentation Project.
> You can fetch it from ftp://ftp.mincom.com/pub/mtr/sdf/.

Fine. Because yesterday I've fetched the sdf-2.000b11a.tar.gz and there I'd
some problems when trying to test-drive your example test page posted
recently. For instance the LaTeX output actually was plain ASCII. And the
PRE_HEADER/PRE_FOOTER stuff was not working. I've now fetched
sdf-2.000b11b.tar.gz and will try again with this one.

> The new things in this release are:

> 1. SGML output now works
> 2. HTML_PRE_HEADER/HTML_POST_FOOTER variables are provided for
> tuning the HTML layout
> 3. Headings in HTML and plain text formats are numbered.

Good.

> Unfortunately, I haven't been able to test SDF -> SGML -> LaTeX
> as the installation of sgml-tools 0.99.14 at my site isn't
> perfect. In particular, if I type:

> sdf -2sgml test.sdf
> sgml2latex test.sgml

> then the sgml2latex bit fails silently. :-( Perhaps, it because
> we don't have LaTeX/TeX installed?

No LaTeX itself should not be needed to generate LaTeX, it is only needed when
compiling the LaTeX source to DVI. Hmmm... seems like you have other local
problems.

> However, most other things in sgml-tools work for me, i.e.
> sgmlcheck, sgml2html, sgml2txt, sgml2rtf, sgml2info and sgml2lyx.
> As such, I'm pretty confident that the SGML I'm generating is ok.

Sounds good.

> As always, I've got some loose ends to tidy up, but there should be
> enough functionality there to be useful. If you run into bugs
> and/or limitations, let me know. Patches are always welcome,
> of course!

Ok, I'll test sdf-2.000b11b.tar.gz now and give feedback.

Ralf S. Engelschall
rse@engelschall.com
www.engelschall.com

On Tue, 19 Aug 1997, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:

> Ok, I'll test sdf-2.000b11b.tar.gz now and give feedback.

How is the ADP project going? Has a decision been made on
SDF vs SGML-Tools vs ... ?

Are there bugs in SDF 2.000b11b which are high priority for ADP?

Ian.

In article <Pine.SOL.3.95.970829183158.12375A-100000@orb.mincom.oz.au> you wrote:

> On Tue, 19 Aug 1997, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:

> > Ok, I'll test sdf-2.000b11b.tar.gz now and give feedback.

> How is the ADP project going? Has a decision been made on
> SDF vs SGML-Tools vs ... ?

> Are there bugs in SDF 2.000b11b which are high priority for ADP?

Sorry, I know that my feedback still not occured, but I'm very busy this week
with my Website META Language (WML) project which had to be enhanced and fixed
these days to be able do generate new webpages at work. I hope I can give
feedback about ADP this weekend. Perhaps on sunday... But I can at least say
that the current SDF worked fine with the example page, but I really want to
try the complete handbook skeleton to give the people a real world chance to
decide SGMLTools vs. SDF. But for this I had to convert the complete currently
available handbook skeleton (not much to do, but costs time ;_) to SDF.

Or is someone else willing to convert the current handbook .sgml files as
found on http://www.apache.org/~rse/... to SDF format?

Greetings,
Ralf S. Engelschall
rse@engelschall.com
www.engelschall.com

On Fri, 29 Aug 1997, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:

[snip]
> feedback about ADP this weekend. Perhaps on sunday... But I can at least say
> that the current SDF worked fine with the example page, but I really want to
> try the complete handbook skeleton to give the people a real world chance to
> decide SGMLTools vs. SDF. But for this I had to convert the complete currently
> available handbook skeleton (not much to do, but costs time ;_) to SDF.
>
> Or is someone else willing to convert the current handbook .sgml files as
> found on http://www.apache.org/~rse/... to SDF format?

Ralf,

I'm happy to help, just let me know which bits.
How long do you expect it to take?

Ian.

In article <Pine.SOL.3.95.970831225844.4155A-100000@orb.mincom.oz.au> you wrote:

> On Fri, 29 Aug 1997, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:

> [snip]
> > feedback about ADP this weekend. Perhaps on sunday... But I can at least say
> > that the current SDF worked fine with the example page, but I really want to
> > try the complete handbook skeleton to give the people a real world chance to
> > decide SGMLTools vs. SDF. But for this I had to convert the complete currently
> > available handbook skeleton (not much to do, but costs time ;_) to SDF.
> >
> > Or is someone else willing to convert the current handbook .sgml files as
> > found on http://www.apache.org/~rse/... to SDF format?

> I'm happy to help, just let me know which bits.
> How long do you expect it to take?

Oh, yes, you _CAN_ help. As you know to make a real voting "SGMLTools vs. SDF"
we need two real-world document examples to compare. This example is the
skeleton handbook as found on the above URL. The pages there were created with
a few .sgml files as input and SGMLTools 0.99.x plus two wrapper scripts as
the transformation tool. Now we need the same skeleton handbook as .sdf files
and the target formats as SDF will produce them. Then we can do a voting where
every one 1. looks at the source (.sgml and .sdf) and votes for the input
language and 2. looks at the target formats and votes for the look&feel of
those. These two points (input language and optical and practical result)
together should leads to a decision. Then we can begin to actually start ADP.

So, it would be a great help if you can create .sdf pages which contain the
same stuff as the current .sgml files and then try to generate good output
formats with SDF. At least as good as the ones from SGMLTools or even better
;_)

Do you have time for this? I don't think it is very time consuming, perhaps 4
hours, but one has to do it...

Greetings,
Ralf S. Engelschall
rse@engelschall.com
www.engelschall.com

On Sun, 31 Aug 1997, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote:

> So, it would be a great help if you can create .sdf pages which contain the
> same stuff as the current .sgml files and then try to generate good output
> formats with SDF. At least as good as the ones from SGMLTools or even better
> ;_)
>
> Do you have time for this? I don't think it is very time consuming, perhaps 4
> hours, but one has to do it...

I'll try and make some time in the next day or so.
I'm off to the AUUG (Australian Unix Users Group) Conference
from 3-5/Sep, so I'll have some time then, if not before.


Ian.