Status update of docbook formatter

[Henrik Nilsen Omma]

Hi Mikko,

Sounds great! I don't speak python that well just yet, so I can't judge
the code, but it sounds like an important step. I'm CCing in the doc
team mailing list because there were some questions about it there.

Mikko Virkkilä wrote:

>= Done =
>The docbook gets generated and it even validates against the dtd most of
>the time. With the exception of the macros, survives all of moins
>syntax.
>
>= To be done =
> * Tables don't support fancy stuff (alignment etc)
> * Most macros (including TableOfContents and draw:myimage) need to be
>fixed
> * bigger (fontsize +1), smaller (fontsize -1) and rule (horizontal
>line) don't do anything, since couldn't find suitable stuff in docbook
> * Pagelink and interwiki-link handling is broken, too tired to fix it
>now
> * IDs don't get added to elements (like titles), see previous item
>  
>
There may of course be certain features of either Moin or DocBook hat
prove difficult to implement, but it might then at least be a good help
to document that so those features can be avoided.

>= Comments/Notes =
>
>I haven't tested this much. I'm spamming you with this because I believe
>in the "release early, release often"-mantra.
>
>
>== Installing ==
>To install the docbook generator, you need to drop the attached file in
>the MoinMoin/formatter directory. Then the output can be accessed by
>adding "?action=format&mimetype=xml/docbook" to the url.
>
>Example:
>http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/FrontPage?action=format&mimetype=xml/docbook
>
>Remember that you need to have the latest version
>(moin--main--1.3--patch-725 as of this writing) to be able to use it.
>
>
>== Macros ==
>Currently macros directly call the formatter's methods. They need to
>call them for each start and end tag. This easily results in invalid
>markup, since it's too easy to forget to call the closing tag, or
>accidentally putting an element inside something that shouldn't have
>that sort of elements (image inside headline). 
>
>In the long run I hope that macros could output moin's own markup to the
>page just before it gets parsed. This is how most macros work. Think of
>how horrible it would be if macros in C would output gcc's internal
>memory structures or pure binary directly, instead of outputting C. 
>
>I'd guesstimate that 99% of the macros wouldn't need anything beyond
>moin's own syntax, and they would (almost?) always be valid from the
>formatters point of view.
>
>  
>