RE: [boost] BoostBook

From: Ferdinand Prantl (ferdinand.prantl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-09-22 09:55:21

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Douglas Gregor [mailto:gregod_at_[hidden]] 
> Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 16:19
> To: Boost mailing list
> Subject: Re: [boost] BoostBook
> 
> On Monday 22 September 2003 10:02 am, Kevin S. Van Horn wrote:
> > Douglas Gregor wrote:
> > > there is a project to normalize the look-n-feel of Boost 
> > > documentation via the "BoostBook" documentation format.
> >
> > Looking at the BoostBook Wiki, it states that the goals for the 
> > BoostBook format include
> >
> > - should be possible to express mathematical formulas
> >
> > How well does BoostBook meet these goals?  It seems to be based on 
> > DocBook, and my experience with DocBook has been that using it is 
> > quite painful if you have any significant amount of 
> mathematics in your document.
> 
> It's failing this goal quite fantastically, for the reason 
> you give. DocBook had a whole heck of a lot of advantages 
> that LaTeX did not, but LaTeX had the solid math support. 

Currently it is possible to use MathML or the TeX math syntax for
mathematical formulas in DocBook. OK, there is possible to write a
stylesheet for some new syntax... but these two are supported within
standard distributions.

The former is terrible to write by hand and I am not aware of a good and
free MathML editor. A necessity of such an editor also does not go well with
the second point (easy-to-read sources). Another question is to get it
working through XSL/FO...

The latter benefits from the easy and readable TeX syntax but is limited for
the LaTeX output unless someone creates a convertor to MathML (or says me,
where it is... :-) I have used it and for PS/PDF it works fine. If the work
is math-specific, it is enough. However as a general guidline for a XML
framework it is not nice.

> 
> > - source format should be easy to write and read.
> 
> This is mostly a matter of taste :) XML can be tedious to 
> write (although the editor support is very good), but it's 
> not hard. One can write a simple BoostBook document using the 

[snip]

I do not know how much of Boost.Doc DTD differs from DocBook DTD; it should
be possibe to customize DocBook templates of some DocBook-friendly XML
editor (Adept, Morphon, XXE - I have used, ...). Such editors allow not only
context-sensitive element handling but also a WYSIWYG mode.

Ferda

> 
> 	Doug
> 
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