Re: News and Important tasks (Was Re: mini-HOWTO)

[Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>]

If you use the very latest LyX, you will have a fairly passable DocBook
export mode, but it is a one-way street.  There is a "5 minute review"
of LyX for DocBook at http://www.teledyn.com/help/XML

Overall, though, and I know many people do not want to hear this, you
do not _want_ a GUIDocBook.  Having a display that shows you just one
of the possible DTD rendering schemes is at best misleading and at
worst, it leads you to write very bad DocBook docs.  DocBook is
important to tech documentation precisely because it seperates content
from visual elements and allows tech information to be presented in a
huge variety of forms.  What we need are tools that handle the
attributes of the tags and the structure of the entities, not
something that renders <CODE> in courier and <EMPHASIS> in italics.

The sooner we wrap our heads around that paradigm shift, the sooner we
will grasp the inherent advantages of DocBook.  Without that shift in
essential understanding, we are back to writing flat ascii.  Far from
offering any advantage, using LyX or even FrameMaker/XML to write
DocBook is more like using vi to write a spreadsheet.  You're much
better off learning a new system (like Emacs) and accepting that this
is a new way of composing technical docs; it does no good to try and
fit it into the old GUI/wp mindset.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@linux.ca>: office voice/fax: 01 519 4222723
TCI - Business Innovations through Open Source : http://www.teledyn.com
Canadian Co-ordinators for Bynari International : http://ca.bynari.net/
Moderator, Linux Education Group: http://www.egroups.com/group/linux-ed


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