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<title>Re: Outline for Author's Guide</title>
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<h1>Re: Outline for Author's Guide</h1>
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<li><em>To</em>: <A HREF="mailto:kclark@ntlug.org">kclark@ntlug.org</A></li>
<li><em>Subject</em>: Re: Outline for Author's Guide</li>
<li><em>From</em>: &quot;Edward C. Bailey&quot; &lt;<A HREF="mailto:ed@redhat.com">ed@redhat.com</A>&gt;</li>
<li><em>Date</em>: 05 Dec 1999 22:22:31 -0500</li>
<li><em>Cc</em>: <A HREF="mailto:ldp-docbook@lists.debian.org">ldp-docbook@lists.debian.org</A></li>
<li><em>In-reply-to</em>: Kendall Clark's message of &quot;Sun, 5 Dec 1999 20:58:25 -0600 (CST)&quot;</li>
<li><em>References</em>: &lt;<a href="msg00010.html">14411.6824.457038.770755@cmpu.net</a>&gt; &lt;<a href="msg00011.html">Pine.LNX.4.10.9912051030010.21594-100000@jd.linuxports.com</a>&gt; &lt;<a href="msg00013.html">14411.9809.995760.73135@cmpu.net</a>&gt;</li>
<li><em>Reply-to</em>: &quot;Edward C. Bailey&quot; &lt;<A HREF="mailto:ed@redhat.com">ed@redhat.com</A>&gt;</li>
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<li><em>Resent-date</em>: 6 Dec 1999 03:22:39 -0000</li>
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<pre>
(I'll preface my comments by saying I've not seen the AG outline, so
hopefully I won't be speaking at odds with that document, but here
goes... :-)
&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt; &quot;Kendall&quot; == Kendall Clark &lt;kclark@ntlug.org&gt; writes:
Kendall&gt; I've done enough DocBook with teams of 10 to 20
Kendall&gt; authors/editors/content-personnel to know that a &quot;quick FAQ&quot; will
Kendall&gt; not suffice.
I'd have to agree. One of the problems I had with our LaTex &gt; DocBook
conversion was that I didn't have a &quot;best practices&quot; document that I could
point my staff to, and say, &quot;make your documents adhere to these
guidelines.&quot; I was never more than a week or two ahead of them in terms of
my knowledge of DocBook, and I quite often found myself having to correct
their work because they just didn't have a standard to work from.
If nothing else, the AG should give the authors some idea of the way to
handle the more common markup situations, define commonly-used entities,
etc. A quick review of the available tools would be handy, too (although I
imagine that as time goes on, this will be less of an issue, as more
distributions will ship reasonable DocBook-friendly tool configurations).
...
Kendall&gt; This is important so that authors will know which precise DB
Kendall&gt; constructions they want to use *from among a range of options* to
Kendall&gt; get the desired effect. Yes, separating content from presentation
Kendall&gt; is essential to an SGML project; but individual authors are still
Kendall&gt; going to be asking questions like, 'how do I get this bold or
Kendall&gt; italic?'. Even if we want to help them think about their documents
Kendall&gt; in more semantic, and less presentational terms, we still have to
Kendall&gt; handle the transition cases.
Yes, and from what I've seen of linuxdoc, it appeared to be heavily biased
towards presentation, which will lead to more author confusion/frustration,
as DocBook is just as heavily biased towards semantics. We used LaTeX
command definitions that gave reasonably semantic markup (which make our
conversion to DocBook a bit easier), but even so, my staff was still doing
ugly things like marking up a sample grep command using &lt;filename&gt; &quot;because
then it'll come out in Courier&quot;. Old habits die hard, but to really
benefit from SGML's separation of semantics and presentation, you really
have to make that break completely. I predict this will be an area that
will require significant effort in order to get the authors on the DocBook
bandwagon...
Ed
--
Ed Bailey Red Hat, Inc. <A HREF="http://www.redhat.com/">http://www.redhat.com/</A>
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<ul><li><strong>References</strong>:
<ul>
<li><strong><a name="00010" href="msg00010.html">Re: Outline for Author's Guide</a></strong>
<ul><li><em>From:</em> Kendall Clark &lt;kclark@ntlug.org&gt;</li></ul></li>
<li><strong><a name="00011" href="msg00011.html">Re: Outline for Author's Guide</a></strong>
<ul><li><em>From:</em> &quot;Poet/Joshua D. Drake&quot; &lt;poet@linuxports.com&gt;</li></ul></li>
<li><strong><a name="00013" href="msg00013.html">Re: Outline for Author's Guide</a></strong>
<ul><li><em>From:</em> Kendall Clark &lt;kclark@ntlug.org&gt;</li></ul></li>
</ul></li></ul>
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