From owner-davenport@berkshire.net Mon Mar 16 15:57:02 1998 Date: Mon, 16 Mar 1998 20:37:42 +0100 From: Cees de Groot <cg@evrl.xs4all.nl> Subject: DAVENPORT: Please allow me to introduce myself
Hi,
As this seems a quiet enough list to warrant getting to know each other, and because the Davenport Group asks for feedback on DocBook projects, I'm taking the liberty to introduce myself.
Probably a number of people here have heard about SGML-Tools, formerly known as Linuxdoc-SGML. Since well over a year, I have been maintaining this product that mainly targets Linux Documentation Project authors but is also in use for other applications (I got into it because I wanted a simple and easy to use toolkit for technical documentation, as I presume a lot of others have).
Last year, a number of discussions centering around DTD problems (we use a DTD based on QWERTZ, and there are some nasty hacks in there), realization has grown that maintaining a DTD is not really something that a bunch of amateurs in their spare time will be able do handle successfully. We went looking around for alternatives, and to make a long story short, we settled on DocBook.
SGML-Tools v2.0 will be an all-new version of SGML-Tools (currently in its 1.0 incarnation) that will base on DocBook and offer users migration software from linuxdoc to DocBook. We hope that this move will give authors more freedom in choosing their software, give anthologists and publishers/Linux distributors more useful raw material, and maybe even move a lot of current LaTeX-based documentation into the existing body of SGML documents.
At the moment, the main target is to decide which software to base on: Quilt, by Ken MacLeod, or DSSSL. From there on, we'll attempt to build a distribution that offers functionality comparable to the current version of SGML-Tools (like support for multiple languages), and we hope to release in 98Q3.
My main interest in this mailing list is getting to know DocBook so that we can setup boilerplate documents and style guides especially for HowTo authors. Documentation is something the old version of SGML-Tools didn't handle too well, but as it seems that the next version will basically be a wrapper around existing software, I hope that we'll have time to do things right this time.
Thanks for listening,
Cees
Cees de Groot http://pobox.com/~cg <cg@pobox.com> SGML-Tools Maintainer http://pobox.com/~cg/sgmltools