Re: [docbook-apps] Linux Weekly News: A quick look at Conglomerate0.70

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@mindspring.com>]

On Sun, 14 Sep 2003, Steinar Bang wrote:

> The Achilles heel of DocBook when "selling" it as a MSWord
> replacement, has been the lack of an acceptable editor.  I myself use
> Emacs+PSGML, and am happy with that.  But I have no problem seeing
> that it's not for everyone.

i know i've mentioned this before, but i'm pretty satisfied with
having defined a pre-docbook grammar i call "pidgin" docbook.
i type directly in pidgin DB, and the first phase of generating
the final output is to transform that with a fairly trivial 
stylesheet to real docbook.

as an example of the brevity, here's an example:

<s><t>Questions for discussion</t>
  <ol>
   <e>How could you summarize the disk usage (in kilobytes) just for the 
students in this
    class, ignoring all other users on the host?<sp2/>
   </e>
   <e>How could you (without actually doing it)
    <ol>
     <e>compress all regular files in the current directory?<sp1/></e>
     <e>compress all files recursively in your <fn>bin</fn> 
directory?<sp1/></e>
    </ol>
   </e>
  </ol>
 </s>

it should be easy to see the abbreviations for things like section,
title, orderedlist and so on.  i also defined multi-element shortcuts
to save even more time, so that <e> == <li><p>.  it doesn't take long
to get used to typing this way, although i'm well aware that, when it
comes to selling into the enterprise, this wouldn't be a good selling
tool. :-)

rday