Noob questions mallard/docbook

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Thu, 20 May 2010, Mark C. Miller wrote:

> On Wed, 19 May 2010 17:14:33 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 19 May 2010, Mark C. Miller wrote:
> >
> >> I want to help with the documentation (proof-reading is about all
> >> I'[m qualified to do; maybe testing instructions).  I've been in
> >> contact with Phil Bull who is going to start me easy with plain
> >> text stuff. Nevertheless, I've watched some discussion about
> >> docbook vs mallard. Thought I would take a peak at them and see
> >> what was being discussed. I found docbook in the repositories
> >> using Synaptic and downloaded it to try out but can't find
> >> mallard.  A google search for Mallard was all over the place:
> >> from Donald Duck references to a site about genome processing. I
> >> also saw some references to "bzt" in some previous discussions--
> >> at least I seem to remember it. How does that fit into the
> >> picture?
> >
> >   http://projectmallard.org/
> >
> > rday
>
> there's no download option on that page.  Where can I find it?
>
> On a second note; I used synaptic to download docbook, but can't
> find it.  There was no addition to the applications menu, and I
> can't find a way to invoke it from the command line.

  ok, you've piqued my curiosity and, since i have a pretty fair
handle on docbook processing, i went looking for the mallard bits and
pieces i could install and play with.

  normally, with any XML application, you first need the definition of
the language, in DTD or Relax NG or some other format, and here's the
page with links to the schema:

  http://projectmallard.org/1.0/index.html

and, secondly, you'd normally need the corresponding XSL
stylesheet(s), one for each format you want to render your source
into, and that's what i don't immediately see.

  on this page:

  http://projectmallard.org/about/learn/code.html

i can see near the bottom the incantation to take a mallard-format
source file and render it into HTML:

$ xsltproc -o index.html --xinclude --stringparam mal.cache.file index.cache \
  `pkg-config --variable mal2html.xsl yelp-xsl` \
  index.page

and i can see a reference to exactly what i expected -- something
called "mal2html.xsl", which would be the mallard->HTML stylesheet.
but i have no idea where that comes from.

  anyone else have a pointer?  i'd be happy to test this out later
today, but i don't know where to get the missing mallard-related
pieces to go with the ubuntu publishing packages and commands.

rday

p.s.  i suspect any further discussion on this topic would be more
appropriate on a mallard mailing list if one exists.

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

            Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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